While most 14 year olds are folding paper airplanes, Miles Wu from New York City is folding origami patterns that he believes could one day improve disaster relief after winning $25,000 for his research project. Wu has been folding origami as a hobby for more than six years, mostly of animals or insects, and recently started designing his own. His winning project at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge in October focused on an origami fold called Miura ori, which is known for collapsing and expanding with precision. Wu spent months testing whether the strength to weight ratio of the Miura fold could be leveraged to improve deployable structures used in emergency situations like tents. He got the idea while learning about natural disasters like the 2025 Southern California wildfires and 2024’s Hurricane Helene, discovering that current emergency structures are sometimes strong, sometimes compact, and sometimes easily deployable, but almost never all three.
Wu tested 54 hand folded variations across 108 trials using three different parallelogram widths, three different parallelogram angles, two different parallelogram heights, and three different types of paper. He placed each variation between guardrails and gradually added weight on top until they collapsed, using every book in his home before having to ask his parents to purchase exercise weights. Wu believed smaller and less acutely angled panels made of heavier material would yield a greater strength to weight ratio, but his hypothesis was only partially correct. While small and less acutely angled panels showed better ratios, copy paper had the strongest strength to weight ratio, not heavier materials. The strongest Miura ori Wu tested could hold over 10,000 times its own weight, which he calculated to be the equivalent of a New York City taxi cab holding over 4,000 elephants. Maya Ajmera, president and CEO of the Society for Science, says Wu not only had an extraordinary project but shined as a leader in the competition’s creative problem solving challenges. Wu and his parents decided to put the $25,000 award toward higher education, but he’s already thinking about prototyping a real Miura ori emergency shelter that could be used in real life situations to actually help people. The teen wants to keep working on origami related research across different fields, proving that sometimes the most unexpected hobbies can lead to solutions for the world’s most pressing problems.
