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Lane Tech High School senior Divine Osuji steals spotlight at Chicago Public Schools science fair
For decades, some of the city’s brightest students have shown their very best at the Chicago Public Schools science fair, but a Lane Tech senior stole the spotlight this year.
Divine Favour Osuji, who just goes by Divine, doesn’t just love science, he lives it, and he also lives to help people in need.
The young people participating at the 75th annual Chicago Public Schools Science Fair and Exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry are exploring just about anything you can think of, from clean eating to sensor fusion, and more.
But Divine’s project is personal.
“Growing up, I saw my grandparents suffer with a lot of different health complications,” he said. “We were spending all this money on these health care devices, yet it was also putting a horrible economic dent in our pockets. I just wanted to ensure other families out there don’t need to go through that same emotional suffering.”
So Divine decided to find a way people could monitor their health without breaking the bank.
“My focus was on measuring three primary health vitals; which were heart rate, temperature, and blood oxygen levels,” he explained. “The whole point was to try to get accurate health measuring with vitals, also keeping the cost as small as possible.”
This wasn’t Divine’s first rodeo. For other science fairs, he’s created a prosthetic hand connected to a webcam.
“It’s sort of like shadowboxing, in a sense, where whatever movement you made in front of that camera, the prosthetic would mimic that movement,” he said.
He also developed a cost-effective way to remove garbage from a populated area back in his native Nigeria. All of his projects center on his basic belief that “anyone should be able to get adequate health care services, and there shouldn’t be a price tag on that.”
Lane Tech chemistry teacher Lucy Young heads the Alpha-STEM and science departments, and says his determination is amazing.
“Divine is one of those special kids,” he said. “Divine has very creative energy to him. He sees a problem in the world, and he wants to try to fix it.”
Divine said his parents are “driving factors” for him, and his grandfather urged him to think big, even as a little boy.
“We’d have a lot of intellectual debates, even though I was only 5 years old,” he said.
Intellectual curiosity is what brought Divine and other budding scientists together at the fair. It means the world to Carrie Kaestner, a teacher at Von Steuben Metro Science Center, who helps put it all together.
“Their thoughtfulness, their professionalism, it just gives me hope for the future” she said. “These are our future voters, and they’re going out, and they’re going to be creating all this stuff and making the world a better place.”
That’s definitely Divine’s plan. CBS News Chicago asked what he thinks his “super power” is.
“The ability, I guess, to acknowledge when I’m wrong because then it also gives me time to improve,” he said. “I’m not incredibly arrogant. I still have a lot to learn.”
Divine plans to major in biomedical engineering in college. Next year he’ll be a science fair alum, following in the footsteps of others who went on to become engineers, doctors an teachers, many of whom CPS says return to the science fair as judges.
Earlier this year, Divine was named 2025 national STEM champion for developing that cost-effective prosthetic hand.
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Marie Saavedra
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