VA Student Named Time Magazine's 2024 'Kid Of The Year'

FAIRFAX, VA — Heman Bekele, a 15-year-old student from W.T. Woodson in Fairfax, was named the 2024 Kid of the Year by Time Magazine.

He is recognized for developing an affordable compound-based bar of soap that could one day be an easier way to deliver medication to treat skin cancers, including melanoma.

Bekele told the magazine: “I’m really passionate about skin-cancer research. … Whether it’s my own research or what’s happening in the field. It’s absolutely incredible to think that one day my bar of soap will be able to make a direct impact on somebody else’s life. That’s the reason I started this all in the first place.”

What won Bekele this honor was a science fair project, according to WTOP.

“I saw so many people that were working really long hours under the hot sun,” he told the station. “What keeps me pushing forward is thinking back to the impact that I will be able to have on those groups of people when I one day release that bar of soap.”

In October 2023, the 3M company and Discovery Education named Bekele, a rising 10th-grader at Woodson High School in Fairfax County, as the winner of its Young Scientist Challenge. The honor came with a prize of $25,000.

He spends time each week working in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore toward the goal of perfecting the cancer-fighting soap.

“I was raised under the thought that I could always ask questions, be as curious as possible, learn as much as possible,” Bekele told Washingtonian. “And then all that learning and questioning pushed me to the field of science.”

At a networking event in February, Bekele met a Johns Hopkins professor who had heard of his success, and invited him to come work in her lab.

“I remember reading somewhere something about this young kid who had an idea for a skin-cancer soap,” Vito Rebecca, a molecular biologist at the Baltimore university, told Time. “It immediately piqued my interest, because I thought, how cool, him wanting to make it accessible to the whole world.”

The pair have been testing the soap on lab mice, working toward an eventual FDA patent.