Naperville entrepreneur's anti-bullying app gains recognition
Trisha Prabhu might be one of Naperville's best-known residents, and it's all because her work to end cyberbullying is gaining national recognition.
Trisha, 16, coded an app called ReThink, which provides a pop-up warning whenever someone attempts to post a harmful or offensive message on social media. The app gives the user a chance to choose not to post something hurtful - a decision she said teens make 93 percent of the time when prompted by the program.
Since Trisha created ReThink about two years ago, it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, promoted to more than a million students in Michigan as part of an anti-cyberbullying campaign and caught the attention of more than 2,000 schools across the world.
"It's been very successful, for sure," she said.
The app's recent success has brought Trisha, a junior at Neuqua Valley High School, to the TV screen and the Big Apple.
On TV's "Shark Tank," she scored a $100,000 deal with entrepreneurs Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner in exchange for 20 percent of her business.
"It really opened a lot of doors and also brings to life this new world of entrepreneurship, which is social entrepreneurship and companies that focus on their missions as much as they do their margins," Trisha said.
In New York City last week, she received the Prodigy Award as a Health Hero from the online health resource WebMD and the chance to donate $7,500 to the organization of her choice.
She chose the Naperville Public Library because the 95th Street location has been a key site in the development of ReThink.
It was at the library where Trisha conducted much of the scientific trial that determined ReThink is effective at encouraging users not to post bullying words. The research brought her to the global finalist round of the 2014 Google Science Fair and to the White House Science Fair in 2015.
"It helped me get my start and interest into science and coding," she said about the library. "The beauty of the library is it epitomizes the idea that we're always learning."
The library likely will use the donation to create a green screen room at 95th Street as part of its efforts to enhance technology.
Trisha's next goal with ReThink is to get it translated into Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, French and German and ensure the artificial intelligence that recognizes mean messages can function within those cultural contexts.
At school, she's taking four advanced placement and one honors class. She's involved in choir and the student advisory council and she runs an antibullying group called Guardians of the Valley. She's involved in Model United Nations through the University of Chicago and serves as the student member of the city of Naperville's public utilities advisory board.
With so much going on, Trisha's ReThink business employs a small staff to handle public relations and emails. But she stays in charge.
"I'm actively involved in absolutely anything that's happening," she said.