2026 • USA • Student: North Carolina School of Science and Math

Aarush Jain

Hi, I’m Aarush, from Cary, North Carolina. I love building things, especially assistive tech, robots, and algorithms that solve problems. Outside of that, I’m a pretty active person. I enjoy playing basketball, soccer, and pickleball, spending time outdoors, and hitting the gym. When I’m relaxing, you’ll probably find me playing video games or sleeping. I’m always curious and looking for the next thing to build.

Contact WaterTank

Manager for Stockholm Junior Water Prize

Alia Baidoun

alia.baidoun@stockholmwaterfoundation.org

2026•Aarush Jain

GRIME: Garbage River Interception and Modeling Engine. A Hydrologically Grounded, Equity-Weighted Geospatial Optimization Framework for Siting Stationary Debris Interceptors on Small Urban Waterways

Every rainstorm turns a small urban creek into a conveyor belt of plastic that rides the current to the sea. Cities want to catch it, but the engineering studies that pick a single boom location routinely cost six figures and take most of a year. We built GRIME to shrink that gap: a free browser tool that scores every meter of any stream a user draws on a map. It runs a D8 flow model on USGS 3DEP ten-meter elevation data, then blends 27 parameters spanning litter generation, hydrologic transport, downstream ecological and environmental-justice impact, and deployment feasibility into a two-level weighted score, cross-checked against Manning’s equation and stress-tested with a 10,000-iteration Dirichlet Monte-Carlo run. Applied to Ellerbe Creek, GRIME…

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