PasT WInners Young Scientists of the Year 1965 - 2013

No matter how long the exhibition runs there can only ever be one first winner of the Young Science accolade and that one person is John Monahan. The inaugural exhibition took place in the Mansion House Round Room, one of the few places in central Dublin big enough to handle the 230 or so students in attendance in that first year. John won the prize with an “artificial stomach”, a collection of flasks and tubing all connected together. “As I remember it, it was an apparatus to examine and describe how enzymes digest food in the body,” John says today. He recollects it as a “relatively small affair”, but he was immediately interested in participating. “I was a nerdy kid at home with my own lab. This was just another thing to play at. I never even thought of winning.” He had no bother with the initial round of cursory questions, but the judges came back with tougher ones, “to be convinced I knew what I was talking about”, he says. Security was perhaps not quite as tight back then as it is today. The students were all sent to another room after judging and were told to go home and come back the next day, but John went back to the exhibition room later while the cleaners were there and saw his project had a star attached to it. He thought little of it until the next day when the Young Scientist for 1965 was announced. “It was only the next morning when I realised good heavens I did actually win. I was totally surprised.” Needless to say John stuck with science. “I had always been interested in science and it was very clear to me from the get go I wanted to be a scientist. After the Young Scientist there was no looking back. After that I was totally motivated, and the fact that I was first that year gave me a little boost.” John completed a BSc at University College Dublin and then a PhD in Canada. He moved to Houston,

The concept was born at a science fair in New Mexico, USA

First ever Young Scientist was held in the Round Room at the Mansion House and attracted 230 entries

Newbridge College, Co. Kildare An apparatus to demonstrate and examine the various chemical reactions that take place in the human body during digestion and to examine the effects of abnormal conditions

Ursuline Convent, Co. Sligo The “four colour problem” in topology. An attempt to form a proof or partial proof of this problem and to extend the proof to cover other surfaces

St vincent’s CBS, Glasnevin, Dublin Salmonellis in Mice: A study of etiology, course and effect of the disease on the host

St James’ CBS, Dublin To determine the extent and nature of mineralisation in the iron-manganese lode at Cloghleagh, Co. Wicklow, by means of electrical resistance, geo-resistivity and natural current surveys

Wesley College, Dublin The construction and use of a spectro-photometer to investigate complex ion formation in a transition metal

Convent of Mercy, Co. Longford To extract pigments from various flowers and investigate their possible practical use

Texas and worked in recombinant DNA and was at the Roche research institute in New Jersey. He later moved to the San Francisco Bay area and worked for a number of biotech firms until he set up his own Nasdaq-listed company in the 1990s. John is now semi-retired but still serves on the boards of a number of US and Irish-based biotech companies, but he still remembers that trip to the Round Room and the impact it had on him. “To my mind it gave you a certain a real level of self confidence and motivation,” he says. “One of the things that always strikes me when I come back is the creativity of young Irish students. It is really exceptional. It just creates an atmosphere of creativity and a little bit of competition. It allows students interested in science to get motivated and get involved at an early age.”

A bit of maths, a bit of biology and lots of computer science merged to deliver a Young Scientist win for Richard Elliott, the first student from Northern Ireland to win the top prize. His project was about using computer modelling to track how a hypothetical insect species might evolve over time, making one think it must be about biology. But in reality the project was made because of his interest in computer science. Describing it today, Elliott is a bit dismissive of what he accomplished, suggesting that any A-level biology student would have realised he was theorising about a real insect that formed part of the curriculum, the peppered moth that changes colour over time depending on the colour of the plants it visits. And the maths bit, the Hardy-Weinberg equation, could enable that student to calculate how that theoretical bug might evolve. No typical student would have taken the next step however, to merge the bug and the maths and shove them through a computer. “My insight was to realise that tedious, repetitive calculations are just the thing computers are good at so it would be an ideal demonstration of how computers could be applied to a biological problem,” says Elliott. “Once written and tested the programme could be fed a few bits of information about the insect population and it would churn out the results for hundreds, or thousands, of generations in seconds.” He made the project his own however when he got a line printer to deliver attractive graphics. This was in the days before computer screens if such a thing can be imagined. He had to programme the printer to deliver the graphics he wanted using the old Fortran language. He entered the maths section with his project, never thinking for a moment he might win. His win provided proof that it all comes down to the project and the work put into by the student. He did not feel the win affected his plans for the future much. “My A-level subjects were long since decided and my initial university applications, to study medicine, had been made,” he says. Even so he could see how the exhibition “gives students an opportunity to think like a scientist and to conduct a scientific investigation in a way that is not easy within the confines of a school academic curriculum.” Then there is the confidence building of having to explain and defend a project with the judges. “In all these things it is the participation rather than the hope of prizes that is important, and I think most contestants enter it in that spirit,” he says. He completed his medical degree in Edinburgh and then held surgical posts in Scotland before moving to England and a change of career direction. He entered government service in the Health and Safety Executive where he worked for almost 20 years. Now retired, he still enjoys working with computers, but he builds rather than programmes them nowadays.

Presentation Convent Clane, Co. Kildare A survey of Lough Bollard, near Clane, to determine its history and the reason for its disappearance in the 18th century

Coláiste Mhuire, Baile Atha Cliath Grinn- staidéar ar pterostigmata Schools from Northern Ireland participated for the first time

North Monastery CBS, Co. Cork A painstaking search for minerals and pollutants in water samples collected in jars over a number of years from the sea off Youghal

Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh The use of computer techniques to provide mathematical models of biological situations

St Finian’s College, Mullingar, Co. Westmeath A study of photoelectric cells and construction of a spectrophotometer

Group projects introduced for first time

Our Lady’s Secondary School, Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan To the existence of minerals by means of analyzing rock slides; to carry out a geophysical survey aimed at verifying direction and depth of veins and mineral outcrops

Not everyone admits it but many people live in dread of spiders. But spiders were Catherine Conlon’s best friends when she entered the Young Scientist Exhibition, helping her to win the top award with a study on spider webs. “The original title was quite long, a study of the physical, anatomical and biochemical aspects of the spider and its web making processes,” says Conlon. If the title was detailed the actual research was even more complicated. She looked at the web and its physical attributes, and the spider’s method when building a web. In particular she wanted to see how two common spider species adapted to changes in their specific environment over a two year period. This meant having to get up close and personal with the arachnids and their complex webs. She measured the strength of individual fibres, noting how the “scaffold” strands were particularly strong – stronger by weight than steel cable – while the “connector” strands were more elastic. She used a device that could measure the tiny force needed to break a strand and went into even more detail, studying the angles formed between the web strands to see how this might change through the year in varying wind and rain conditions as the seasons came and went. She also looked at the differences in web design adopted by the two spider species under study. Try to imagine doing all of this analysis for a week with all the note taking and measurements and drawings. Now expand that effort into the two years she spent on the project and you see why the Young Scientist judges might have been impressed. The exhibition helped her to crystallise what she wanted to do in the future and although in the realms of science it wasn’t in physics or chemistry. “It didn’t guide me toward a science career, but it

New range of categorisation for projects

Colaiste Mhuire, Dublin An integrated study of the scientific conservation of Rogerstown Estuary, County Dublin

Crescent College Comp, Dooradoyle, Co. Limerick A study of effect of proven pollution on ecological balance in the Shannon at Limerick

Midleton College, Co. Cork The concept of Ecopolemiology as Illustrated by a Preliminary Study of the Bionomics of the Earwig

Alexandra College, Milltown, Dublin Lichens in relation to their environment

Muckross Park, Dublin A study of physical, biochemical and anatomical aspects of the spider and its web, and its adaptation to its environment

Convent of Mercy, Moate, Co. Westmeath Lichens may be used for medicine Participated in International Science & Engineering Fair for first time

helped in more general terms,” she says. Participation served her in many different ways. “It is a great platform for students to stand up and express their opinions, and it increases your confidence in being able to do this on any stage. I wasn’t used to standing and expressing opinions and having the confidence to do that,” she says. “Maybe that is one of the reasons I am in the occupation I am in, lecturing. I have never had any fears of standing up and that is a major aspect.” The career she pursued is in public health and epidemiology. She qualified as a medical doctor at University College Dublin and did GP training before moving into the public health area with the health board. She did further degrees in public health and moved into academia, lecturing in public health and epidemiology. Despite a career in health, she still finds time for writing, both fiction and non-fiction, yet another area where she can stand up and express an opinion.

Who remembers the famous ZX Spectrum computer? If you have one in the attic it might be valuable as a collector’s item but it was the latest computer technology in its day. And it proved central to the project put together by 1985 Young Scientist winner Ronan McNulty. The project involved building a keyboard which when played could deliver a printout of the played music in full musical note notation. It was sensitive enough to include pauses and get the tempo correct as well. He decided to build the device for very personal reasons. He comes from a very musical family and his father at the time liked to compose music, McNulty says.

Carrickfergus Grammar School, Co. Antrim Microcomputer based robotics

Colaiste Choilm CBS, Swords, Dublin Simulation of Drude Electron Theory and Kinetic Theory of Gases His father was blind and, although he could readily work on a keyboard and build a composition, he would then need his son to sit down alongside him and write out the musical note as his father played the piece. “There was no way for him to get his thoughts onto paper,” he says. “It was slow work so I wanted to find a way to automate the process.” He found an old keyboard and started to make a few additions, putting in switches at the base of each key so he could wire up all the notes. The ZX Spectrum was at the heart of the project, taking keyboard input data and converting each keystroke and pause into an output signal to the printer. So when his father played a new composition, the system would deliver a full printout of the music at the other end. The resultant project was a great help to his father, but it also enabled McNulty to take the top prize at the exhibition. “The win really wasn’t life-changing, I had always wanted to do science anyway and so the win didn’t have an impact on that.” Participation did however provide him with new skills. “What it does do is give you confidence, something that stays with you. It also makes you focus for six months and work hard on a project like that. These are characteristics that a scientist needs,” he says. The exhibition does something else, it celebrates science. There are lots of awards and financial rewards for those involved in sports, music, dance and other pursuits but few for science, he says. “The guy in the corner doing the science is a nerd.” The exhibition does however turn science and research into a mainstream activity, one affecting all the students but also society at large. “That kind of recognition is important. It went out on national television and the message was science is good,” he says. He went on to get degrees in physics and is now a lecturer in the subject at University College Dublin. His specialisation however is particle physics and he is a researcher at the European home of particle physics, Cern. He is an author on the paper describing the discovery of the Higgs Boson, and he heads a team from UCD working at Cern.

St Mary’s College, Rathmines, Dublin The Musical Typewriter (A system which prints music as you play)

Rosary College, Raheny, Dublin Focus on the viola Tricolour - an Indepth study on Bull Island

Going round in circles is what happens when you are lost, but not when that person is Peter Taylor. He and his fellow researchers, Shane Browne and Michael O’Toole, won the 2001 BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition with a project about making circles. These were no ordinary circles, they were circles made from many small pieces put together like a puzzle to form the circle shape. Each piece was a polygon and the challenge for the three was to find a way to calculate the lowest number of pieces needed for a given polygon to make a circle. These were not circles with a smooth round edge but they had to satisfy a requirement of being “invariant under rotation”, as Taylor puts it. Sounds easy? Not really. Polygons come in countless forms depending on how many sides they have. Pentagons have five and hexagons have six, but what if the polygon had 55 sides or 100 sides? Taylor and his group from St Kilian’s Community School in Bray developed a way to calculate this and discovered no matter how many sides a polygon had, ultimately you could form a circle. And for the record a 100-sided polygon needs a minimum 100 pieces while a 55-sided polygon also needs 100 pieces, Taylor says. His teacher suggested the challenge after spotting it in a maths magazine. “I would not have been reading maths journals,” he admits, but he was willing to attempt the project because of the challenge. “All of what you needed could be found in the basic maths curriculum, but it took creativity to deliver a proof,” Taylor says. “We didn’t use computers, it was pencil and paper and that was the beauty of the project for me, it was totally analytical,” he said. “It took several months to do it, but we didn’t know the project would be considered so good or be regarded so highly.” Winning was an “incredible experience”, but he had form as they say. The year before he was part of a team that took second place as best group with a project on Pascal’s Triangle. This win spurred him to want to take a top prize, which his group did the following year. The Young Scientist Exhibition had a lasting impact on him. “For me personally the exhibition really crystallised my interest in maths and I decided to pursue it at third level. I was thinking of engineering but the win gave me confidence to stick with the more abstract maths.” He did a bachelors in maths/ science at University College Dublin, then went to Cambridge University where he completed “part three of the mathematical tripos” the oldest masters level maths course in the world, he says. Taylor completed a PhD back at UCD and is now an assistant professor in Trinity College Dublin’s school of maths. “The exhibition is so important because it allows the student to engage with science out of the school context and that is important. It shows there is more than what you learn out of a text book.”

FCJ Secondary School, Bunclody, Co. Wexford Fibre Optic Liquid Analyser

Navan Community College, Co. Meath Geothermal Study of the River Skane First year of EU Union Contest for Young Scientists, which Ireland has won 15 times!

Ursuline Convent, Thurles, Co. Tipperary A Study on a Crop Fractionation Industry

Alexandra College, Milltown, Dublin Studies of the Oyster Thief

St. Patrick’s College, Maghera, Co. Derry Dynamics of a Two-Well Potential Oscillator

St. Paul’s Secondary School, Dublin A Picture Winged Insect - Population Dynamics of a Thistle Predator Terellia Serratulae

Abbey Grammar School, Newry, Co. Down Assessment of Female Quality by Male Gammarus

Meteoric is certainly one word that comes to mind when considering the early career trajectory of the 41st Young Scientist. In January 2005 he held aloft the top prize at the exhibition smiling for the photographers. Three years later he was again smiling for the photographers, but this time was holding a cheque for €3.2 million. He and his brother John had just sold their company Auctomatic to a Canadian firm. And Patrick was happy to attribute his inspiration and success to his BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition win.

He has no hesitation in his support for the exhibition and what it does for young people. “It is the best outlet I know for Irish students to pursue meaningful, original, creative science work...which is about the most interesting pursuit there is,” he says. For Patrick Collison it was always about computing. He started programming computers at the age of 10 and attended a programmers’ class at the nearby University of Limerick as a youngster. He brought a project to the Young Scientist Exhibition in 2004, one involving artificial intelligence, and took the runner up individual award in that year, one of the four top prizes.

He won the exhibition outright the following year with yet another computer project. He created a new programming language he called Croma, a dialect of the Lisp language originally developed in 1958 by John McCarthy. Collison reworked the language to make it easier to write web applications, something the judges agreed made for a very good project and he captured the top prize in 2005. Having started with computing he was hardly going to switch careers and move to something else. He started studying maths and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but left to set up Auctomatic with his brother John. The company developed software that could be used to track sales on eBay and they had hoped to raise funds and establish the firm in Ireland. When the financial support wasn’t forthcoming they headed for California and won backing to get the company up and running. After selling it the two brothers set up a new company in 2009, Stripe, which provides a service for individuals and companies making it easier to take in payments made over the internet. Based in Palo Alto in California, the company employs 75 people, he says. Collison believes he got a tremendous boost from his win at the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition. It wasn’t just the confidence boost and the satisfaction of winning such a challenging event, it was also the fact that he could add the accolade to his curriculum vitae, something that helped him convince backers to invest in his ventures. “It was easily the most important thing that happened in my secondary school career and opened a lot of doors and opportunities. I remember it fondly,” he says.

St. Brendan’s Community School, Birr, Co. Offaly

The Secret Life of the Calluna Case-Carrier

Abbey Grammar School, Newry, Co. Down Factors Affecting Cavitation in Whole Plants, Leaves and vascular Bundles using Acoustic Detection

Scoil Mhuire Portarlington (Colaiste Iosagain), Co. Laois The Perfect Queen Bee

Dominican College, Belfast, Co. Antrim The preservation of Biological Data in European Bog Bodies

Esat Telecom took over as sponsors from Aer Lingus after 33 years.

Colaiste an Spioraid Naoimh, Bishopstown, Co. Cork

The Mathematics of Monopoly

Scoil Mhuire Gan Smals, Blarney, Co. Cork Cryptography - a new algorithm versus the RSA

Colaiste Ris, Dundalk, Co. Louth

The Geography and Mathematics of the Earths Urban Centres