This 14-year-old teenager won a prize of $25,000 for discovering a new origami pattern

Miles Wu of New York won the $25,000 prize in the 2025 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. Wu, 14, won the grand prize for his research project that combined origami and physics.

He measured the amount of weight that the Miura-ori origami patterns could bear in various criteria. Wu said the model could help improve deployable structures in emergency situations.

While most 14-year-olds are folding paper airplanes, Miles Wu is making origami patterns that he believes could one day be useful in crisis relief efforts.

The teenager told Business Insider that he has been doing origami as a hobby for more than six years. In a project that won first prize in the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, Wu spent months investigating how the strength-to-weight ratio of the Miura-ori pattern could be used to improve deployable structures in emergency situations.

Basically, Wu tested the amount of weight the Miura-ori pattern could bear on different types of paper, parallelogram heights and widths, and different angles. Wu got the idea while studying natural disasters, such as the California wildfires in January and Hurricane Helen, which hit the southeastern United States in 2024. He also explored how people are using origami in STEM fields, including medicine.

“The problem with existing structures for emergencies is that, for example, tents are sometimes strong, sometimes very collapsible, and sometimes easily deployable, but almost never all three, but the Miura-ori can solve that problem,” Wu said. “The Miura-ori model is really strong, light and very compact.”

Wu tested 54 different samples and performed 108 experiments. In Miura-ori, a sheet of paper is folded into a smaller surface with repeating parallelograms. To find the winning combination, Wu tested three different parallelogram widths, three different angles, and two different parallelogram heights. He also examined three different types of paper. This means, Wu tested 54 different samples and performed 108 experiments.

“After folding the samples with the help of a cutting machine for accuracy, I placed them between the fences so that my tests were the same throughout the process,” Wu said. Then I put heavy weights on them.”

He would gradually put more weight on each test specimen until they collapsed. Surprisingly, the origami samples were very sturdy. Wu used all the books in his house as weights until he had to ask his parents to buy weights.

Wu believed that smaller, less angled panels made of heavier materials would have a higher strength-to-weight ratio. At the end of the experiments, his hypothesis turned out to be partially correct. Small, less angled panels showed a better strength-to-weight ratio, but Wu found that plain paper had the highest strength-to-weight ratio.

“The latest statistics I obtained on the strongest Miura-ori tested show that it can support more than 10,000 times its own weight,” Wu said. I calculated that this is the equivalent of a taxi in New York City that can carry over 4,000 elephants.

Wu won first prize in the competition in Washington, DC. From almost 2,000 applicants, the judges selected 300 and then narrowed it down to 30. These 30 individuals then traveled to Washington, DC to present their work and participate in challenges. These challenges played an important role in the judges’ decision to award the awards.

“One of the things I really want to do is to prototype one of these Miura-oris to create a real emergency shelter that can be used in real situations and help people,” Wu concluded. “But overall, I would like to continue researching origami.”