Future Leaders winner overcomes health challenges to help others

Throughout the school year, CBS Colorado honors high school students who are excelling the science, technology, engineering and math, STEM. Future Leaders Award winners get $1,000 and a profile on CBS News Colorado. The latest Future Leaders winner is Nyjah Munn, a senior at DSST: Conservatory Green. 

CBS News Colorado caught up with him after school when he was wrapping up Science Fair Club for the year. It's a club he started to get more of his peers to participate in the Denver Metro Regional Science Fair. 

"The actual science fair is somewhat difficult to get involved in if you don't have a parent or a mentor so I wanted to serve that position for someone. I wanted to be a mentor helping them to fill out the proper paperwork, get the right deadlines," Munn explained. 

He and two of his classmates were chosen to compete this year. 

"My project is 'Feeling Happy', a novel approach to incorporate emotional inducing sensory substitution training protocols into existing sensory substitutions," Munn recited. 

That is a very technical way of saying that he created a device that can help people with blindness feel emotions when they're using sensory substitution devices. Last year's science fair projects was a device to help people with blindness navigate the world. It uses lidar sensors to detect objects are away. He hopes that one day it might replace the white cane that so many people with blindness use.

"The trial went really well. So people using this device navigated 33% more efficiently than when they used the traditional white cane," Munn said. 

"Why did you take on this?" asked First Alert Meteorologist Lauren Whitney. 

"I can't stand to live in a world where people don't have opportunity just because they don't have the ability to see. Everyone deserves, in my mind, an equal opportunity to life...and equal opportunity to success," he responded.

Munn is all about making the most of opportunities. He's a member of the Mile High Flight Program out of Wings Over the Rockies. It's a program started by the original Tuskegee Airmen to provide aviation opportunities to underserved communities. He got to fly gliders. 

"I really love just this idea of being above ground...of doing something that humans aren't meant to do," he said. 

In his young life, he's already faced some serious health challenges. 

"At the end of my freshman year, I had a stroke and big medical kind of problems," he said. 

Ultimately, Munn ended up with a diagnosis of lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease. It's a condition he navigates and treats every day. 

"My goal in life is to impact other people...is to be like a beacon of hope for other individuals, and I can't do that if I'm unhealthy and struggling. I can't do that if I'm on the couch, and so my lupus is a huge obstacle, but it's something that I have to tackle otherwise I won't be able to help other people," Munn explained. 

Munn is planning to go to Rice University next year, where he'll study electrical engineering and computer science. 

"What do you see in  your future potentially for a career? I feel like you're going to be an entrepreneur...I can just feel it," Whitney asked. 

"So social entrepreneurship is really my dream...my passion. I want to create humanitarian progress through technological innovation," Munn replied. 

LINK: Future Leaders 

CBS Colorado accepts applications for its Future Leaders Award from September to April.