28 Sep 2026
EC presents winners of European Contest for Young Scientists
The European Commission announced the winners of the 37th edition of the EU Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) on 27 September 2026 in Kiel (Germany). Over one week, around 140 young scientists (aged 14 to 20) from almost 40 countries had presented their scientific projects to an international jury, the public and their peers.
The projects winning the first prize of € 7,000.- each are:
- Tommaso Vaninetti, Abdoellah El Makkaoui and Frida Tirari from Italy for their project ‘PlantLeaf - a system to detect and analyse plants’ reactions to stress’
- Kazimierz Jakub Chomicz from Poland for his project ‘Chicken McNugget problem in embedding dimension four’
- Nikoloz Tkebuchava and Lizi Chachua from Georgia for their project ‘In Silico Analysis of Conservation and Structure of FAM163A and Its Potential Role in Cancer’
- Gurnoor Kaur from Canada for her project ‘Eigenpulse: Eliminating Demographic Bias in Pulse Oximetry and Remote Photoplethysmography from First Principles’
The second and third prizes (€ 5,000 and € 3,500 each, respectively) went to projects from Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey and Ukraine. The Special Jury Prize of €2,500 went to Ireland. The winning projects share a total of €64,500 in prize money.
EUCYS is the European Commission's contest for young science students, open to 14- to 20-year-olds who have won first prize at their national science competition. Established in 1989, it gives participants the opportunity to compete with peers from across Europe and beyond, and to get guidance from some of the continent's most prominent scientists. Since 2026, EUCYS is part of the wider Science Comes to Town initiative and supports the objectives of the ERA Policy Agenda by bringing science closer to citizens. Science Comes to Town is a Horizon Europe-funded action under the WIDERA Work Programme, supporting groups of cities to co-organise a year-long programme of science-engagement activities, in the spirit of the European Capital of Culture or European Green Capital initiatives.
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