The BT Young Scientist Awards is not just a competition that highlights the most innovative students across the country, it’s a platform that can boost their careers.
The competition, which began in 1965, has attracted hundreds of students who have taken the world of science and technology by storm.
We’ve taken a look at some of the winners over the years to see where they stand now.
Sarah Barthelet with her father David Flannery
John Monahan (1965)
The very first winner of the Young Scientist competition was John Monahan, who won the grand prize in 1965 by building a working model of the human stomach.
John Monahan with a photo of him winning the BT Young Scientist Award in 1965. Photo: Mark Condren
After winning the competition, he had a great career as a biotech entrepreneur.
After completing a science degree at UCD, he moved to the US, obtained his PhD and founded his own biopharmaceutical company, Avigen Inc, in the 1990s.
In 2014, the Silicone Republic reported that he is now semi-retired and serves on the boards of several US and Irish-based biotech companies.
Sarah Barthelet (Flannery) (1999)
In 1999, the Corkonian won the top prize in the competition for her project on cryptography.
Sarah Barthelet with her father David Flannery
John Monahan with a photo of him winning the BT Young Scientist Award in 1965. Photo: Mark Condren
She made headlines all over the world for the project she created at just 16 years old.
She created the Cayley-Purser algorithm, based on the work of cryptographer Michael Purser with additional naming by mathematician Arthur Cayley.
This algorithm is now a public key cryptography algorithm and has skyrocketed Ms. Barthelet to success.
She went on to win the top prize at the EU Young Scientist Awards and two years later wrote a book with her father called David In code where she shared her experience of creating the algorithm and her love of math and coding.
Adnan Osmani (2003)
The Mullingar native and winner of the 2003 BT Young Scientist now works for Google Chrome as an engineer and is an internet star in his own right.
He has a YouTube show called Totally tool tips on the Google Chrome Developers channel and an impressive 285,000 followers on Twitter.
He has also written two books called Learning Javascript Design Patterns and To develop Backbone.js applications.
Patrick Collision (2005)
In 2005, the Limerick native won the competition at the age of 16 for his project called Croma: a new dialect of Lisp programming.
For the competition, he created a new Internet programming language that writes code to instruct computers to do something, a new form of Lisp programming invented years earlier.
Patrick Collison and former President Mary McAleese
Creating this program would be key to his success, and just three years later he moved to the US and sold his first software company he co-founded with his brother John, Auctomatic, for €3 million.
The now billionaire brothers then invented Stripe, a software that allows businesses to accept and manage online payments. Some of the largest companies in the world, including Google and Amazon, use the software.
Due to its incredible success, the Collison brothers are two of the richest people in Ireland, with an estimated net worth of €11.5 billion each, and they were featured on Forbes’ coveted 30 under 30 list.
Alexander Believes (2011)
In 2011, Alexander Amini won the BT Young Scientist for his tennis sensor data analysis and took home the top prize at the EU Young Scientist competition in Helsinki.
He was only 15 when he won the award for his project tracking a tennis player’s orientation, speed and hitting habits through sensors worn by the player.
Judges said that at 95% accuracy, it had significantly higher accuracy than other similar techniques.
Mr. Amini is now a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has been voted the best university in the world for 12 years.
He studies computer science and artificial intelligence and has been involved in many AI projects that have been covered in the media worldwide.
In his biography on the MIT website, he says, “The purpose of my research is developing the science and engineering of autonomy and its applications for safe decision-making for autonomous agents.
“My vision is a world with adaptive autonomous agents that are able to learn to communicate in complex, uncertain and extreme scenarios, and support people in cognitive and physical tasks.”