Credit: FJSL

The Fondation Jeunes Scientifiques Luxembourg (FJSL) has reported that two young scientists from Luxembourg recently won prizes at a contest in Katowice, Poland.

The FJSL recalled that the last time Luxembourg won a Core Prize at the EU Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) was nineteen years ago. Now, for the 35th edition, two fourteen-year-old Luxembourgers - the youngest participants in the competition - have won the Jury Special Award, worth €2,500.

Ido Somekh and Leonardo Magnani received praise from the judges for their invention "AllergyScan", a user-friendly application that uses QR codes on food packaging to instantly identify allergens in products - a solution that could simplify the lives of millions of people suffering from chronic allergies.

Last spring, the "Jonk Fuerscher" competition organised annually by the FJSL selected three research and/or development projects from its top ten teams to represent Luxembourg at EUCYS 2024. This year's event took place from 9 to 13 September in the European City of Science (ECSK) 2024, Katowice, under the aegis of the European Commission. There were 143 participants aged fourteen to 20 from 37 countries, divided into ten categories. A total of 94 projects were in the running to win one of the thirteen Core Prizes, i.e. cash prizes.

The Luxembourg delegation consisted of:

- nineteen-year-old Petra Straga, who provided an in-depth review of the impact of an enzyme (telomerase) on cell ageing in the "Biology" category;

- nineteen-year-old Johann Bost, who analysed the propagation speed of spots on the Sun's surface using satellite data in the "Physics" category;

- Ido Somekh and Leonardo Magnani, two fourteen-year-old secondary school students from St George's International School, who were defending a new application (AllergyScan) developed entirely by them, in the "Computing" category.

After three intense days in contact with 21 judges (scientists and engineers), the verdict was revealed. In the end, it was the two youngest competitors, Ido and Leonardo, who came out on top in terms of monetary prizes - splitting the sum of €2,500 between them. When asked what they plan to do with their prize money, the like-minded duo said they would like to "invest it on the stock market".

Alongside the Core Prizes, EUCYS partner institutions took advantage of the event to reward a handful of budding scientists and engineers with a number of non-monetary prizes. In this context, FJSL offered two Romanian secondary school students, eighteen-year-old Alexandru Turculeț and seventeen-year-old Tudor Dochia - specialists in the low-cost integration of electronic components on printed circuits - the opportunity to take part free of charge in the next Luxembourg International Science Expo (LISE), which is taking place at the Forum Geesseknäppchen from 4 to 8 November 2024.

The EUCYS 2024 first prize winners, unveiled at the award ceremony at the Silesian Museum in Katowice on Friday 13 September, were:

- fifteen-year-old Lamia Music from Austria, with "Sustainable and Advanced Approaches to Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells" (Environment);

- sixteen-year-old Nikhil Vemuri from the United States, with "ANOMaLY: A Real-Time Globalized System for Effective Regional Mitigation of Agricultural Nitrous Oxide Emissions" (Environment);

- nineteen-year-old Piotr Olbryś from Poland, with "Design of new pyrene-4,5,9,10-tetraone-based heterocyclic derivatives as high-capacity organic cathode materials: a density functional theory study" (Chemistry);

- seventeen-year-old Aleksandra Petkova from Bulgaria, with "Theoretical and Experimental Investigation of Ship Wakes" (Physics).