Lucas Tejedor da Silva

Lucas Tejedor is a student at the Federal Center for Technological Education of Rio de Janeiro (CEFET/RJ). A self-taught innovator across a range of disciplines such as programming, social sciences and politics means Lucas has worked on a huge variety of projects an innovations – over 30 – despite his young age. He created an app that was used at his university to help people know where to recycle electronic waste as Brazil has one of the highest rates of this problem in the world. Because of the platform’s innovative methods, it was published in the international scientific journal, the Brazilian Journal of Development.  He also created an A.I. that could identify fires through imaging in order to help rapidly identify forest fires, winning 1st place in the CEFET/RJ exposition, the second largest science competition of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Lucas hasn’t just worked alone. He gathered a collective of outstanding students in various departmental areas and led the team to working on a total of 38 projects that were sent to the CEFET/RJ exposition, being awarded two first place medals.

Lucas also started the project Ubuntu, in partnership with the organization "Casa de Cáritas", which has the goal to connect non-profit organizations in Brazil and was a finalist in the Prudential Community Award.

Passionate about making helping those less fortunate in the wider community, Lucas worked on a social impact project to help refuges that come to Brazil from Africa to find the appropriate institutions to guide and support them, which included content to counter racism against immigrants. The project was awarded first place in the EXPOSUP, the science competition for graduate students.

Lucas’s philosophy is to never stop learning, but most importantly to learn by taking risks and undertaking projects in the real world. This way, he is able to learn new technologies, concepts or programming languages all while making impact on society. As he learns more, he can solve more problems in innovative ways and open up new opportunities to learn even more.

Looking ahead, Lucas is now trying to develop a new AI-based technology to detect oil spills for the Rio international Oil & Gas Congress. If he were to win the Global Student Prize, Lucas would invest in this project to carry out the experiments needed in the hope of making this technology viable. This would include buying a drone and various materials to simulate oil spills. This would also benefit the Fire Detection Device Project he is working on.

He would also prioritise the Ubuntu project, as he believes it has been most impactful for non-profits and could be a game changer in Brazil.