A 17-year-old student from Plano has been honored with a national award for developing an artificial intelligence tool designed to track air quality in communities that lack monitoring infrastructure. Nathan Tan received the 2026 Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes, which includes a $10,000 grant, for his work addressing environmental inequality in Dallas.
Tan founded the Shared Skies Initiative to combat disparities in air pollution exposure. He noted that lower-income areas and minority families often experience higher pollution levels but have fewer local monitoring stations. His project utilizes machine learning to predict pollution levels in areas without physical sensors, using data from existing monitors to verify accuracy.
Approximately 1,000 Texas residents currently use the group’s live online map to check real-time air quality.
The initiative grew from Tan’s personal experiences and observations while tutoring in West Dallas. He suffers from a respiratory illness and has lost family members to lung cancer. During his tutoring sessions, he noticed that local children had asthma rates several times higher than the state average, despite only one official monitoring station covering more than 900 square miles in the region.
Beyond the digital tool, the Shared Skies Initiative has distributed practical resources to families. The group created a bilingual 50-page guide on air pollution and provided copies to over 60 low-income schools, reaching roughly 30,000 students. Tan’s team also trained 300 young ambassadors to interpret air data for their families and distributed 50 homemade air filters and 10,000 KN95 masks.
The organization has also engaged in local advocacy, organizing letter-writing campaigns and providing testimony at city council meetings. These efforts included requests for officials to close an industrial shingle plant located near residential areas in West Dallas.
