Pranav Sivakumar is an American speller and amateur researcher. In 2013, he finished second in the

86th Scripps National Spelling Bee The 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee was held from May 28 to May 30, 2013 at the Gaylord National in Oxon Hill, Maryland and was broadcast live on ESPN3, ESPN2, and ESPN. For the first time, the competition included a vocabulary quiz in addit ...

, finished second in the Illinois State Geography Bee, and was named a Siemens Competition National Semifinalist. His National Spelling Bee achievements earned him recognition by Pat Quinn, who declared June 8, 2014 "Pranav Sivakumar Day." In 2014 he was admitted as a student at the

Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, or IMSA, is a three-year residential public secondary education institution in Aurora, Illinois, United States, with an enrollment of approximately 650 students. Enrollment is generally offered to inc ...

, where he graduated in 2017. He currently attends

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

. He was the first person to be a Google Science Fair Global Finalist twice and won the Virgin Galactic Pioneer Award in 2015. Pranav was mentioned in President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Obama was the first Af ...

's speech at the White House Astronomy Night. Sivakumar was named the $20,000 individual winner of the 2016 Siemens Competition National Finals.

Childhood

Sivakumar's aspirations to learn more about astronomy started when he found an encyclopedia on famous scientists lying around the house when he was six years old. Since then, his parents made an hour commute every weekend to drive him to an astrophysics lab where he could attend the 'Ask-A-Scientist' class. Many years later, he teamed up with scientists he met there to study the gravitational lensing of

quasars A quasar is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN). It is pronounced , and sometimes known as a quasi-stellar object, abbreviated QSO. This emission from a galaxy nucleus is powered by a supermassive black hole with a mass ranging ...

References

American spellers Living people 2000 births {{US-academic-stub