For Diana Virgovicova, the global water crisis is personal.

Growing up in a small town in Slovakia, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at age 13. And it wasn’t genetic.

“I discovered that it was actually linked to an industrial activity that was happening around my village,” she recounted, “from the pollution that was in the water, the ‘forever chemicals’ and heavy metals.”

For Virgovicova — who was in New York last week to receive this year’s Cisco Youth Leadership Award at the Global Citizen Now event — it was the start of her life’s mission: to develop a high-tech, low-cost solution to water pollution, a scourge that affects 2 billion people, especially in underserved regions around the world.

While still in her hospital bed, that mission began to take shape.

“I wanted to see the world,” she said, “so I convinced my mom to go on a backpacking trip with me around India and Asia. There, I saw young girls getting sick because of water pollution. And I realized that this is a global problem.”

Given a sharp aptitude and strong passion for science, Virgovicova set about finding her own highly innovative solution. She was quickly drawn to the emerging science of quantum chemistry, with its potential to neutralize contaminants, as well as to AI, to make it doable at speed and scale.

“A part of my body was taken from me because of polluted water,” she stressed, “and I didn’t want more young girls to go through what I went through.”

The result is Xatoms, the Toronto-based company Virgovicova co-founded after moving to Canada to study.

An award for a better future

A CEO at just 24 years old, Virgovicova is well on her way to changing the world.

Speaking from the Global Citizen Now stage, the artist, actor, author, and activist Common summed up her achievements so far.

“Diana's revolutionary work,” he said, “is already impacting people worldwide, reducing cholera outbreaks to removing e-coli from rivers and working with indigenous communities in Canada to provide access to safe drinking water. And that translates into 3.1 billion liters of river water and 1.3 million liters of drinking water and counting.”

With financial and technical support, the Cisco Youth Leadership Award helps young innovators like Virgovicova scale their solutions for positive impact. And Fran Katsoudas, Cisco’s executive vice president and chief people, policy & purpose Officer, joined Common onstage to present the award.

“When Cisco and Global Citizen joined forces in 2018,” she said, “the intention was to empower young people to solve global challenges by using technology to positively impact the world. And out of that mission, the Cisco Youth Leadership Award was born. Since then, we've awarded seven young leaders.”

Katsoudas was especially excited to introduce the eighth.

“This year's recipient, Diana Vergajova, is a young visionary who co-founded Xatoms,” she announced, “a company that leverages AI to purify water and create amazing solutions.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Hugh Evans, founder and CEO of Global Citizen.

“The Cisco Youth Leadership Award has every single year inspired young people around the world about the intersection between technology and changing the world,” he stated. “And Diana is no exception. By focusing on clean drinking water, which is one of the core tenets of the eradication of extreme poverty, and using amazing technology to do it, she's the best example of how young people around the world should aspire to use their time and talents to be agents of change.”

A low-cost, scalable, energy-efficient solution

Together with AI, quantum chemistry — which applies quantum mechanics to molecular and chemical dynamics — is at the heart of Virgovicova’s work. And this emerging branch of science has intrigued her ever since a professor introduced it to her in her teens.

Today, quantum chemistry enables the Xatoms team to create their own photocatalysts, in powder form. These react with sunlight, tipping off a process called oxidative decomposition to neutralize water contaminants.

It’s a low-cost, scalable, and energy-efficient solution to a problem that can seem intractable.

With help from AI, which accelerates the process of testing new materials from years to weeks — the team has discovered dozens of new photocatalysts. And it can tailor them for specific applications, from pesticides and herbicides to forever chemicals, heavy metals, and biological pathogens.

“I truly believe that if we combine these two powerful technologies, quantum and AI, we can tackle some of the world's biggest challenges,” Virgovicova said. “For instance, we are able to discover new molecules a thousand times faster.”

Founded in Canada in 2023, Xatoms has launched projects in Kenya, South Africa, the U.S., and Canada. And it has already been acknowledged by Google, Forbes and the World Economic

Forum. The Cisco award will enable the startup to scale further and discover new applications.

“I would love to see just how many use cases we can tackle globally,” Virgovicova said in an interview at Cisco’s One Penn Manhattan office, “because global water problems are different according to geographies.”

Virgovicova explained that new threats show up all the time, but that her team is ready.

“There are different emerging contaminants such as pharmaceuticals that are newly being introduced, different types of pesticides, herbicides,” she continued. “But with Xatoms, we can design the technology for these different use cases.”

Inspiration — and practical, real-world impact

For a woman who has accomplished so much at a young age, Virgovicova isn’t planning to rest anytime soon. And she takes her role as a potential mentor and inspiration for others to heart.

“I would like to show young girls and young women that coming from the background I came from without many resources,” she stressed, “but just having this big dream and never letting it go brought me this far. And I want to inspire them to keep going, because we need more young women building deep technologies.”

One way to inspire is for the technology to have the greatest positive impact around the world.

“The goal for me,” she emphasized, “is to make sure that Xatom's technology is the leading water-purification discovery platform, leading the world in solving water pollution.”

In the near term, Virgovicova’s committed to impacting one million people by 2030. But the ultimate motivation is those 2 billion who lack clean water.

“We want to make sure that the number of people that don't have access to clean water is going to be less and less,” she concluded from the Global Citizen NOW stage. “And that my children or my grandchildren will someday not know what ‘water pollution’ even means.”