Local Teen Named a Barron Prize Winner for Pioneering Seaweed Research
Portsmouth’s Alaina Zhang has been recognized as one of twenty-five young heroes across North America for founding Harvesting Change, a student-led project exploring seaweed farming as a natural solution to coastal nitrogen pollution.
Alaina Zhang, who founded Harvesting Change to explore native seaweed’s potential to absorb excess nitrogen along Rhode Island’s coast. Photo courtesy of Liz Ammirato.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes, a local Rhody has made the list. Established in 2001 by author T.A. Barron, the Barron prize recognizes and celebrates inspiring, public-spirited young people from across the U.S. and Canada. Each year, the Barron Prize honors twenty-five individuals from ages eight to eighteen who have made a significant impact on people or the environment. The top fifteen winners receive $10,000 to support their service work or higher education.
Portsmouth resident Alaina Zhang is the founder of Harvesting Change, an organization made to explore native seaweed’s potential to absorb excess nitrogen along the state’s coast. Her research has found that sugar kelp farming could serve as an eco-friendly and affordable method to reduce nitrogen overload by 30 percent. Nitrogen accumulates in coastal waters from agricultural runoff and urban sewage, which can cause algal blooms that become threatening to marine life as they deplete oxygen levels.
At just seventeen years old, Zhang has collaborated with field technicians, marine researchers and local fishermen to conduct her research and shared her work with more than 500 Rhode Islanders through workshops and presentations. Her findings have also been published in a manuscript under review for the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
Throughout her childhood in China, Zhang was surrounded by algae-contaminated waters and saw firsthand how such pollution impacts a community. Seeing this same pollution appear on Rhode Island’s coasts, she turned to researching native seaweed in hopes of finding a potential solution. Reaching out to researchers at Brown University and the University of Rhode Island, she was able to secure permits from the Coastal Resources Management Council and raise close to $7,000 to create a sugar kelp farm, the first to be student-run in her area.
“This journey has taught me that leadership doesn’t begin with confidence – it begins with conviction,” Zhang says. “I’ve learned that initiative isn’t about having all the answers, it’s about being willing to try.”
The Portsmouth resident has co-led the Narragansett Bay Resilience Collaborative to help draft a brief for the state legislature spotlighting actions necessary to improve bay resilience. She has testified in support of five environmental bills, including the Coastal Habitat Conservation Act of 2023, which was signed into law in 2024. barronprize.org
