Haashini Balasubramanian

Haashini Balasubramanian started building Nestling like a typical coding challenge — features, models, debugging — until she read the stories of parents bringing fragile newborns home from the NICU, terrified that one small mistake could be catastrophic. The project stopped being theoretical. Her AI copilot, which organizes medical records, tracks growth and guides overwhelmed caregivers, won the 2025 Congressional App Challenge for North Carolina's 6th District and is headed to app stores. An eleventh grader, Haashini also conducts graduate-level computational-biology research on phenylketonuria, mentors younger students through Idea Garden, and wrote a children's picture book, Luma's Glowcode, to introduce kids to AI through storytelling. Her philosophy — "making difficult things human" — runs through all of it: she's as committed to making intimidating fields feel welcoming as she is to mastering them.