Kamaya Gogna. Image: SciFest
The students were awarded for their projects, which focused on assistive technology for the visually impaired and machine learning for dental imaging.
Ireland claimed two awards at this year’s Eskom Expo for Young Scientists International Science Fair (ISF) in South Africa.
Maura Moore-McCune from The King’s Hospital School in Dublin was awarded a Gold Medal Award and Best in Category Award in the biomedical and medical sciences category for her project titled ‘VIPMOD: Visually Impaired Person’s Moving Object Detector’.
Her project offers assistive technology to help visually impaired individuals navigate their surroundings more independently and safely.
Meanwhile, Kamaya Gogna from St Joseph’s Secondary School in Dublin earned a Silver Medal Award in the computer sciences and software development category for her project titled ‘Continued Study on Using Machine Learning to Identify Radiolucencies on Panoramic Dental Radiographs’.
Gogna’s research uses machine learning to enhance the detection of anomalies in dental imaging.
Parthy Chetty, executive director of the Eskom Expo for Young Scientists, welcomed Ireland’s first team to the ISF.
“Congratulations to the winners from Ireland, who join an elite group of young scientists from 10 countries. I look forward to further participation in the upcoming years.”
Both students will compete at the SciFest National Final on 29 November, having won the Boston Scientific Medical Devices Award at SciFest regional finals in Technological University Dublin Tallaght and Dublin City University respectively.
SciFest founder and CEO, Sheila Porter, congratulated Moore-McCune and Gogna on their outstanding achievements at the ISF.
From left: Maura Moore-McCune and Sheila Porter. Image: SciFest
“Their projects demonstrate the talent, creativity and dedication of young Irish scientists, and their success on the international stage is a reflection of the strong STEM foundation provided by participation in SciFest.”
The ISF awards come hot on the heels of the success of other Irish students in the EU Contest for Young Scientists.
Limerick student Seán O’Sullivan, who won the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition earlier this year, scored one of the four second-place prizes at the EU competition with his project ‘VerifyMe: A new approach to authorship attribution in the post-ChatGPT era’.
Additionally, 2023’s SciFest STEM champion, Jack Shannon, also competed in this year’s EUCYS, coming away with the International Swiss Talent Forum Award.
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