A student from **UNSAM** has become a source of pride for the entire educational community for winning an international competition to travel to **NASA**. Her name is **Malena García Vildoza**, who developed a tool to detect **drinkable water in underground wells**.
Advancing in her career in **social and cultural anthropology**, García Vildoza was attentive to calls and exchanges when at the end of 2023 she found a publication from the United States Embassy about the Pale Blue Dot Challenge.
This competition aimed to encourage the development of a tool based on Earth observation data to solve a social problem related to the United Nations’ sustainable development goals.
“This competition placed a lot of emphasis on being interdisciplinary. The scores were divided into 50% for **social impact** and 50% for hard sciences. So when I saw that premise, I said ‘there I can contribute something’,” García Vildoza explains.
Team formation and project development
Without a previous group, García Vildoza used a community forum created by the organization to interact with other international participants. She contacted Adam Zheng, a US student majoring in aerospace engineering, and became interested in his proposal regarding the **lack of access to drinkable water**. Francisco Furey, a student from Córdoba specializing in data science, and El Hadji Malick DIEYE (Jay), a geologist and mathematician from Senegal, joined the team.
The resulting project was a machine learning-based tool called AquaViva, designed to find **drinkable water wells**. They selected Gambia as the first place to implement the device.
Research process and success in the competition
García Vildoza conducted **interviews with NGOs and environmental activists** from Gambia to understand the situation regarding access to drinkable water and confirm the need for their tool. Over 1500 people from 100 countries participated, and the team was one of the five winners. The prize included a trip to the United States, with visits to renowned institutions and NASA.
The itinerary included visits to NASA’s headquarters in Alabama and the University of Huntsville, where they attended classes taught by experts and participated in the Space Camp. They also visited the **NASA headquarters** in Washington D.C., the National Environmental Agency, George Washington University, and the National Space Council at the White House.
Vildoza highlighted the solid **academic training received at UNSAM**, which allowed her to compete with the other participants. Currently, the team continues to develop the tool to improve its accuracy and expand its application. The tool is available on GitHub for anyone to download and use.
“Access to drinkable water is an issue that will increase, and it is necessary to pay attention to it and seek solutions,” García Vildoza concludes.
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