Gitanjali Rao Is Innovating Kindness Through Tech

Gitanjali Rao missed the first day of eighth grade in 2018. Instead, the entrepreneur from Lone Tree, Colorado, was in New York City demonstrating a device she created to detect lead in drinking water on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The producers took her on a tour of the prop room. “It was just so surreal,” she remembers. But Rao has one regret: “You’re in that dressing room, and you're like, that one couch is where all the icons sit. I told the producers, ‘I will sit on that couch before I leave.’ And I forgot to.”