Biomass stove wins top Young Scientist award |
A Leaving Certificate student from County Cork is to be given the opportunity to travel to Uganda with Self Help Africa to field test the invention which won him the top prize at this year's BT Young Scientists Exhibition.
18 year old Richard O’Shea from Scoil Mhuire Gan Smal, Blarney, Co Cork won both the overall national award at the 2010 exhibition, as well as the Irish Aid/Self Help Africa 'Science for Development Award' for his innovative biomass stove prototype.
The winning student said that his winning entry was inspired in part by a documentary that he saw on RTE television about former Young Scientist winner Tara McGrath's trip to Ethiopia with Self Help Africa to field test a pressure cooking devise that had won her the 'Science for Development Award' at the event in Dublin's RDS, two years ago.
He told the adjudicators that over two billion people worldwide cooked their food without electricity every day, and that stoves that produced less smoke, and that burned more efficiently could make a valuable contribution to lives in the developing world.
The winner's proud mother Helen, who is from Malaysia, said that her son had grown up in a household where there had always been a lot of conversation about the challenges facing people in the poorer countries of the world.
A primary healthcare nurse and midwife, Helen O'Shea said that she had first met her Irish husband Michael when they were both working in overseas development in Africa.
Self Help Africa's Development Education co-ordinator and one of the organisers of the Science for Development Award Patsy Toland said that Richard's success was a testimony to the extensive research and considerable effort he had put into 'a fantastic project'.
He said that the wider impact of the Irish Aid sponsored Science for Development Award was in evidence at this year's BT Young Scientists Exhibition too, as a great many student projects in competition in 2010 had looked at issues affecting people in the developing world.
'Two other major awards were won by a student who had taken malaria as the subject of his project, while elsewhere there were student projects about clean water, hygiene, poverty, HIV, and life expectancy in the developing world', he said.
Richard O'Shea received a Waterford Crystal trophy and 5,000 euro prize as winner of the national competition, together with a 5,000 travel bursary from Irish Aid to travel with Self Help Africa on a field visit to Uganda. |
