All the winners at EUCYS 2017 with their awards. Image: EUCYS
Some of the world’s best and brightest young minds descended on Estonia for the EU Young Scientist competition.
While excitement is already building in Ireland as it gets ready to host next year’s European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS), this year’s event in Tallinn, Estonia, showcased the work of some incredibly talented young people from across the globe.
The competition aims to give students who have won their respective national science competitions a chance to compete on a continental level, with thousands of euro worth of prizes up for grabs.
Among the entrants this year was 2017 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition winner, 16-year-old Shane Curran, with his data storage system, qCrypt.
His technology aims to tackle the huge leap in power that quantum computing will bring along with it, by creating a data-storage solution that is impervious to its strength and capabilities.
However, despite his best efforts, Curran missed out on making the list of prize winners following last night’s (26 September) award ceremony.
Canada takes First Prize (Danish Mahmood) & Second Prize (Colette Benko) Awards at #EUCYS2017. #TeamCanada_ysc #ChooseScience #cwsf_espc pic.twitter.com/J2T8Zlr5WG
— Youth Science Canada (@ysc_sjc) September 26, 2017
Big winners
Arguably one of the standout winners on the night was 14-year-old Canadian student Danish Mahmood, who won one of the three grand prizes as well as €7,000 for his Wireless Interconnected Non-Invasive Triage System (WINTS).
The device can be attached to a patient’s finger during mass-casualty incidents, providing first responders, paramedics and hospital staff with real-time updates of vital signs on an online dashboard and a small screen on the device, eliminating the need for patient reassessment.
The WINTS system is also artificially intelligent as its algorithms can automatically adjust to each patient’s stats, meaning they don’t require any calibration.
Another first-prize winner was 18-year-old Czech student Karina Movsesjan, whose research highlighted the role of RAD51 mutations in cancer development.
One of the second-place winners was another Canadian, 16-year-old Colette Benko, who attempted to develop a therapy for a paediatric cancer called neuroblastoma (NB).
Using epigenetics, she wanted to see if you could treat NB by ‘turning on’ genes responsible for cell differentiation silenced by the disease.
