Chaitanya Karamchedu is the kind of teenager who forces you to completely reevaluate your entire life.

Karamchedu, who goes by "Chai," is a senior at Jesuit High School who has discovered a cost-effective way to take the salt out of ocean water, which could potentially save lives all over the world.

"One in eight people do not have access to clean water," Karamchedu told KPTV. "It's a crying issue that needs to be addressed."

"The best access for water is the sea, right?" he said in an interview with the station. "Just because 70 percent of the planet is covered in water, almost all of that is the ocean. But the problem is, of course, that it's saltwater."

Desalinating water is expensive and difficult to implement on a large-scale, but somehow, in his high school lab, Karamchedu came up with a way to isolate the saltwater using a polymer.

"The real genesis of the idea was realizing that seawater is not fully saturated with salt," he said.

"People were concentrated on that 10 percent of water that's bonded to the salt in sea and no one looked at the 90 percent that was free," Karamchedu's biology teacher at Jesuit High School, Dr. Lara Shamieh, told KPTV. "Chai just looked at it and said if 10 percent is bonded and 90 is free, why are we so focused on this 10 percent, let's ignore it and focus on 90."

Karamchedu's work is racking up the awards. So far he's received a $10,000 award from the US Agency for International Global Development at Intel's International Science Fair, been named one of 300 Regeneron Science Talent Search Semifinalists and placed second at MIT's TechCon Conference.

In the tech world, where the phrase "change the world" is an almost meaningless phrase, Karamchedu idea seems like it might actually do something roughly like changing the world. But now, the high schooler is on to a new problem: Karamchedu's been thinking, theoretically, about new ways to cure cancer.

-- Lizzy Acker

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lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyacker