Kerry student wins Stripe Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition top prize for cancer diagnosis tool
Aoibheann Daly, a fourth year student from Mercy Secondary School Mounthawk in Kerry, was named overall winner of the 2026 Stripe Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, for her project GlioScope: Multi-task Deep Learning and Causal AI for Glioma & Glioblastoma Profiling.
In addition to receiving the grand prize of €7,500, she will go on to represent Ireland at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists in Kiel in Germany in September 2026.
The winning project will aid in the the treatment and prognosis for brain cancer. Doctors currently rely on samples of brain tissue, which is expensive, slow and carries a high risk of bleeding in the brain. Glioscope solves this problem by allowing a doctor to predict what genetic mutation is likely to be present from a simple MRI brain scan, so they can make quicker treatment decisions and reduce risk for the cancer patient.
Prof Catherine Darker, head judge for the health & wellbeing category: “Brain cancer is a devastating condition for people. GlioScope, developed by a 15-year-old student, is an extraordinary achievement. Aoibheann has brought together scientific areas of medicine with computer science to improve the chances of early intervention for people with brain cancer. She is a worthy winner of the Stripe Young Scientist & Technologist 2026.”
Aoife Fadian and Jessica O’Connor, fifth year students from Ursuline College in Sligo, were named best group, with their project Sheep Strength II: Using Sheep Wool to Reinforce Concrete. Expanding on their work from last year, the pair investigated the most effective, market-friendly form of sheep wool as a strengthening agent for concrete.
Barry Kennedy, head judge for the technology category, said: “Using state of the art scientific methods and rigorous evaluation techniques, Aoife and Jessica have demonstrated that embedding wool fibres reinforces concrete strength, enhances its thermal insulation properties and increases its durability. This novel use of wool has the potential to enable the manufacture of more sustainable concrete, enable new forms of thermal batteries, and open new business opportunities for sheep farmers in Ireland.”
Joshua Corbett, a sixth year student from St. Mary’s CBS in Laois, won the individual runner up prize, with his project There’s Plenty of Room To Break Through at the Bottom which identified tiny nanocarriers for drug delivery administered through the nose to treat brain cancer.
Dr Rachel Quinlan, head judge for the chemical, physical & mathematical sciences category, said: “Glioblastoma is the most lethal brain cancer and its treatment is made difficult by the need to transport drugs across the protective brain barrier, which acts like a wall without a door. This expansive project used machine learning to identify the best designs of tiny nanocarriers, approximately one thousandth of the width of a human hair, to act as miniature submarines. By navigating the space of a hundred million billion possible nanoparticle designs, this method can guide the next practical steps in the development of treatments leading to better outcomes.”
Ritvik Venkateshwar and Hao Wen Liu, fifth year students from Stratford College in Dublin, won the runner up group, with their project titled A simulation of Axion Monodromy inflation to investigate whether it can describe our Universe, which used advanced theoretical physics to accurately describe the early universe.
Prof Pat Guiry, Chair of the YSTE Board and head judge for the chemical, physical & mathematical sciences category, said: “This ambitious project tackles the extremely fast expansion of the universe from its beginning. In order to address this, they used advanced theoretical physics. They implemented their model by developing code and validated it by comparison with the latest astronomical observational data.”
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