Los Alamos High School senior Lillian Petersen, who has won multiple awards at Intel Science and Engineering competitions, described Tuesday at a meeting of the Rotary Club of Los Alamos, how she analyzes large data sets to investigate climate, agriculture, malnutrition, and poverty.  She explained her research on creating a real-time monitoring system to predict crop yields in every African nation several months before harvest and how this tool can predict areas of malnutrition. Her work has captured global attention, and she has been an invited speaker at 11 different aid organizations and research institutes, including USAID, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the Big Data in Agriculture conventions in both Kenya and India.  Petersen is currently interning with the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in San Diego, California, where she is exploring how gene activation is related to leukemia.  Photo by Linda Hull