Every March, tens of thousands of people from around the globe flock to Austin, Texas, to learn and connect over panels, parties and tacos at South By Southwest's interactive, film and music conferences. America Tonight's SXDiaries Q&A series highlights interesting and inspiring figures at SXSW.

Shiva Nathan is one of the brightest young innovators in America. A 16-year-old from Westford, Massachusetts, Nathan designed an award-winning prosthetic arm that can be moved using brain signals.

In an interview with America Tonight, Nathan discussed the future of prosthetics and the need for increased emphasis on STEM proficiency nationwide. Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Take me back to the beginning. What made you think of this prosthetic arm?

In the fall of 2012, I learned about a cousin who had lost both of her arms in an accident. My family was telling me about how the arms she had weren’t very good. They were pretty basic. She could only wave them around and grab things. I figured I wanted to help her out and do something useful about that. I started trying to figure out how to build a better, cheaper prosthetic arm.

Modern prosthetics are pretty expensive and specialized, costing as much as a car in some cases; $25,000 for a higher class of prosthetic. I had this headset my uncle had bought me, as I had been big on programming video games. The headset tracks the user’s brainwaves. I thought it would be a perfect, low-cost solution, as it was only a couple hundred dollars. There was a small open source community around it. It got me thinking, “Why couldn’t I use this to help develop prosthetics?”

(Watch Nathan explain the project ahead of the 2014 Google Science Fair.)