‘The time to act is now’: Gainesville High School student invited to speak at United Nations

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) -A 16-year-old Alachua County teen is making history at the United Nations.

Abhith Kasala is a junior at Gainesville High School and will be the first student in Alachua County to speak at the UN General Assembly Conference in New York.

From the age of 10, Kasala has researched the effects of microplastics and how to mitigate them, earning him an invite from the United Nations Science Summit to share his findings.

"My initial inspiration was about 6 years ago in 2018," Kasala shared. "When I was at the beach and I was able to see this image of the shoreline and the sand just polluted with all this plastic and that kind of motivated me, especially as a 10-year-old to research this even further and see why is this such a big problem."

Over the past 6 years, Kasala has been internationally recognized for his various in-depth studies and projects by NASA, the NOAA, and the EPA.

While working with international organizations in southern Africa and professors at the University of Florida, he's created two sustainable solutions to the mitigation of microplastics.

"They both use Moringa Oleifera...as this natural coagulant so how it works is the sea powder from this plant acts as a kind of magnet to different contaminants within the water and settles them to the bottom of any filtration system, from there I was able to take that concept I developed and I was able to create two scalable and accessible solutions."

He tells TV20 studies have found strong correlations between microplastics and cancer.

"They've been seen in the human blood and crossing the blood-brain barrier and I see that as a huge threat an emerging health crisis in the future...understanding the problem is going to be half of the solution." "

Though Kasala doesn't yet have a driver's license, his extensive list of accolades is taking him places.

In middle school, he was the recipient of the 1st place award at the State Science Fair.

He's also the recipient of the Top 300 Innovator in the Nation Award, the Top 50 in the Nation Award at the U.S. Stockholm Junior Water Price competition, and the third-place grand award winner at the most recent International Science and Engineering Fair.

Kasala will speak at the United Nations conference in Manhattan on Friday and is lined up to speak at the Water Environment Federation Leading Flagship Conference in Technology in Louisiana this October.

"It's a huge honor to be presenting there it's kind of a dream so I just want to be able to speak to all the stakeholders, delegates, policymakers... and I think it's going to be a great way to represent my solution there and also promote it see how we can implement this in more locations."

He says he thanks his mom for inspiring him to pursue his interests, beyond barriers.