I have been selected as one of 25 new members, aged 11 to 19, of Japan's Masason Foundation, the organisation founded by Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of SoftBank Group, to back exceptional young people with funding, mentorship, and a global network to pursue ambitious work.
As I said when the Foundation announced the cohort:
Being part of the Masason Foundation will accelerate my work in planetary defence against near-Earth asteroids by combining data from ground and space-based robotic telescopes. The new research and collaboration opportunities through the Foundation will enable me to develop innovative solutions to emerging challenges.
What being a Masason Scholar means
Selection is a rigorous, multi-stage process: an application, a screening of documents, and then a series of interviews. As of June 2024, in the eight years since the Foundation was established in 2016, only 166 members had ever been certified across all generations worldwide. Members range from 9 to 28 years old.
The support is substantial and open-ended. Scholars receive individually tailored support grants - determined through direct conversation with the Foundation - that can partially or fully fund research and development, the launch of a venture or social initiative, or study abroad and higher-level education.
Beyond funding, members have access to Infinity, the Foundation's facility in Shibuya, Tokyo, for research and collaboration, and to lectures and networking events with specialists and experts across fields, including the Foundation's directors. The Foundation describes its aim as helping each member find a mountain worth devoting a life to climbing.
How becoming a Masason Scholar shapes my future
Everything I do here rests on one idea: planetary defence shouldn't be locked behind institutional walls. Cheap computing, robotic telescopes, open datasets like NASA/JPL Horizons, open repositories like ALCDEF, and a language as learnable as Python have put real asteroid science within reach of citizen scientists and students like me.
That approach has led to collaborative projects on space missions. My photometry of the near-Earth asteroid 65803 Didymos contributed to a peer-reviewed multi-authored paper in The Planetary Science Journal documenting how NASA's DART mission shortened the orbital period of its moonlet Dimorphos by 33 minutes. My algorithms for detecting unknown asteroids, built from images taken by telescopes in Canada, Spain, the US, and Australia, won the Best Project Award at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in both 2022 and 2023, the first back-to-back win since 1989–90. That work also earned second prize at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's Young Astronomer Award.
Asteroid collision risks are real and unpredictable. Sixty-six million years ago, the Chicxulub impact is thought to have ended the age of the dinosaurs. We are the first generation with the tools to see the next one coming, and those tools should not belong to only a handful of people. The Foundation's support means I can keep building them in the open.