Bringing you in. For thousands of years, we Irish have asked questions. Why is the sky blue? What's hiding in the depths of the ocean? What happens when you put crisps in bread? What happens? Crisp sandwich. A stroke of Irish genius. We've explored the possibilities of our world. From listening to the stars to a priest who invented the induction coil. Yeah. And that led to the X-ray, saving lives with beams of light. And the hollow needle. Yeah, the hollow needle. It was invented in Ireland. Irish innovation takes many forms. And yet, we're just getting started. The future of Irish science is hoovering up carbon dioxide, developing new mathematical formulas, treating breast cancer and dementia, creating next-gen batteries, building life-saving apps, detecting deep fake AI systems, creating smart...
The future of Irish science is you.
Hello there. Hello.
Hello there.
Hello everybody.
All right.
Hello.
All right. All right.
Woo. We are on. We are here. This is happening. How is everybody feeling?
Yeah. Well, let me tell you the excitement is only going to build. You are all so welcome to the 62nd Young Scientists and Technology Exhibition and the first ever Stripe Young Scientists and Technology Exhibition.
We're absolutely buzzing to kick off a jam-packed week of science and I'm sure you are too.
Yes, we are. You know, we've opened the Young Scientists for it's written up there how many years. I don't want to say we don't count. It's been about 16. But I'm going to tell you honestly, every year is amazing. But this year you are truly in for a special treat.
Yes, this year is a landmark one. After 25 years at the helm, the board of the Young Scientists and Technology Exhibition have appointed a new title sponsor and they are called Stripe, which we are delighted about. Now let me tell you a little bit about Stripe. I'm sure you know plenty about them and you've got to meet some of them already, but Stripe builds financial services for businesses that run online. So, if you've ever bought something from Amazon or the GA or Nando, hands up.
Starting to feel home.
Come on. There's not two people in the room who've ordered food from Nando. Yeah, there we go. Let's tell the truth. Or indeed, millions of other companies that sell online. That payment has probably ran through Stripe.
The founders of Stripe are two Irish brothers, Patrick and John Collison, and they competed in the Young Scientist over 20 years ago. So, it's amazing to have them back.
Yes. On this very stage in the year 2005, Patrick stood here as the winner of the competition before he and his brother John went on to build Stripe.
It is a brilliant example of what students who take part in the Stripe Young Scientist can go on to achieve.
Now I'm sure you know over the year getting your projects ready. It's an incredibly competitive competition. So to be selected to be here to exhibit, you are already all you people here in the room, one of the top young scientists from across Ireland and indeed Northern Ireland. So well done.
Yeah, you should be very very proud of your achievement. Well done everybody.
And just make sure that you make the most of the opportunities this week, whether it's learning something new, meeting like-minded people, or thinking about maybe what you want to do next... your future
and also having fun at the disco. Don't forget that. That's very important. That's number one.
Great crack. Now, speaking of what you want to do next, we are about to welcome our very first speaker to the stage. So, will you give a huge round of applause to the chair of the board of the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, Professor Pat Gyri.
Distinguished guests, friends, and students, a big welcome to the Stripe Young Scientists and Technology Exhibition 2026.
This year's exhibition marks another milestone in a journey that has spanned more than 60 years. It is a story of discovery, creativity, and inspiration, a tradition that has helped shape Ireland's scientific and technological landscape. Since its establishment, the exhibition has been guided by the vision of its founders, the Reverend Dr. Tom Burke and Dr. Tony Scott, who you can see pictured here, Dr. Tom on the left, Dr. Tony on the right. They're both physicists then in University College Dublin. Their belief was simple yet transformative: that young people like you, given the right platform, could ignite ideas that change the world.
Today, that belief continues to thrive under the stewardship of the Young Scientists and Technology Exhibition Limited, a charity founded in 2005, which oversees and governs this national institution, ensuring it continues to thrive and grow while safeguarding its legacy for the future and one that I am honored to be part of as chair of the board since 2018.
Last year, as you know, we celebrated the 25th year with BT Ireland as the title sponsor and organizer. But when they stepped down in February 2025, our board had the responsibility to appoint the new title sponsor. And after a rigorous three-month process, we were delighted to announce Stripe as the new title sponsor and organizer of this exhibition. This is a wonderful full circle story as you've heard, as Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, was the overall winner of the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005, and John Collison, his brother, now president of Stripe, was a category winner.
It is great to have Patrick with us here later for the exhibition.
In another change, our board moved from an oversight role to an executive function, hiring Marahalan and Katherine Chelmia who are central to delivering during the BT era. I thank them for the important role they have played over the past seven months working with the board and the excellent team that Stripe have put in place. So a heartfelt thanks to Stripe, whose commitment as title sponsors in this their first year of partnership signals a bold new chapter.
Stripe's involvement is more than just financial support. It is a shared belief in the power of young innovators to shape the future. Their global perspective rooted in technology and entrepreneurship aligns perfectly with the exhibition's mission to inspire students to think ambitiously and act courageously. We are also proud as a board to have formally extended licenses to Jordan and Kenya, both founded in the last number of years, extending the exhibition's reach internationally. We are delighted to welcome boards, members of their boards, organizers, students, and teachers who join us here today, sharing in this celebration of science and innovation.
The strength of this exhibition in Ireland lies in the community that sustains it. Judges safeguard the integrity of the process of shortlisting and selection of awardees through fairness and transparency. Sponsors including our longtime supporters like the Department of Education and Youth, teachers, volunteers, mentors, and a big hello to the Stripe red coats. Have you met the Stripe red coats yet? Big cheer for the Stripe red coats and blue coats.
All of the aforementioned people play vital roles in ensuring the exhibition's a success. And finally, and most importantly, to the students. Reaching the RDS is itself a remarkable achievement. It reflects months of dedication, creativity, and resilience. Each entry reflects the courage to ask questions, the determination to explore answers, and the joy of sharing knowledge. Whether or not you take home an award, you've already succeeded by daring to explore, by sharing your ideas and by becoming part of this extraordinary community of young scientists and technologists. You have been a success. Your journey begins here and the future is yours to shape. Have a great exhibition. Good luck with all the judges today and tomorrow. I'll meet some of you. Enjoy the next few days. Have a great time. And Gafil Mahaler, thank you very much.
Thank you. Nice. Our first speaker. Thank you so much to Professor Gyrie. Now, it's clear that the passion, the board's passion for this exhibition hasn't dimmed one bit after six decades.
It's very exciting to start a new chapter in the long history of this competition. We've talked about Stripe being the new sponsor, but now it's time to hear a little bit more from them.
Yes, we are very excited. We are about to be joined by a man who sat where you are, as we mentioned earlier, 21 years ago, Stripe co-founder and former Young Scientist winner Patrick Collison. Now, Patrick was planning to be on this very stage in this room with us today. But alas, he has been thwarted by the weather gods. Snow has bound his planes somewhere in Europe, but Stripe do technology and we do have Zoom. So, Patrick is going to join us virtually instead. And he's also promising you because he can't be physically with you today, he's going to do a special Q&A tomorrow and that's going to give you guys an opportunity to ask him anything you want. So when Patrick gets to Dublin, he'll let you know more about that.
For now, he's going to be joined in conversation by Jack Orian Kenny. Jack took part in the Young Scientist three times himself and then went on to run the startup accelerator Patch. He's now working on new ways to protect crops and help farmers make a living. So ladies and gentlemen, will you please give a big virtual welcome to Patrick and Jack?
Thanks so much for joining us virtually.
It's a huge honor to be here.
So I think there's one big question in everyone's kind of mind as they came in here today. Well at least in some people's, and that's what is Stripe?
Stripe builds financial infrastructure for the internet. And what we mean by that is all of the plumbing beneath the surface that's required to orchestrate transactions, to help projects become businesses, and then to help companies around the world scale globally. That's what we started out doing about 15 years ago. And it's a particularly exciting time right now because obviously AI is reshaping everything. And today we work with humans and businesses, but we're thinking very hard about what the AIs and what the agents are going to need and what the broader change in the economic landscape is going to look like.
Okay. Wow. And aside from the obvious, why does Stripe want to sponsor the Young Scientist?
Well, there are personal reasons and then there are Stripe reasons. The Young Scientist was a huge event and a huge presence in my life and in John's. It was the first time I think that school is great but it's a prescribed set of train tracks, and it's hard to do something wholly unorthodox. The Young Scientist was the first time where I feel like I had the chance to do something of my own volition, something that I thought was interesting just for its own sake, and then to have other people take it seriously. That was a very big deal for me. I feel it changed my life. I don't think I'd be where I am without it. Because of the Young Scientists, I had the chance to first travel to the US back in 2005 and then everything kind of followed from that. And then from a Stripe point of view, we work with the most innovative people and innovative companies around the world. It's the most fun, rewarding part of Stripe and we think that Ireland has so much potential. That's why we do immersive software engineering at UL. If anyone in the room is not familiar with it, you should check it out. It's a great course. It's why we're so excited to work with Patch. And it's why we're here at the Young Scientist. I think that Irish talent and Irish people compare very favorably with any other country, any other place in the world. I've traveled a lot around the world and I now say that with conviction and confidence. So for us, it's a huge honor to be able to support it.
Amazing. I think having gone through it myself, I can relate to a lot of that. One thing you did do that unfortunately I didn't is you won the Young Scientist a number of years ago. But you entered twice. You won on your second time. What did you change between those two years?
Well, look, there's always some amount of luck. But I definitely worked harder the second time. The first time I didn't know anything about it. I didn't really know what to expect. It was kind of hard to calibrate. The second time I feel I had a better sense for what the standard was. I think in many things hard work is not sufficient, there are lots of other factors that go into success including luck. But in most domains that I've looked at, I think it is necessary. And second time round I worked really hard.
Yeah. Cool. And you seem to deeply care about science both from your own work and supporting it as well. You've been working on removing bottlenecks with the Arc Institute and Fast Grants. So across this theme, what is the problem you see or that you're trying to solve by supporting these things?
Sure. Stripe works in software technology and financial services, but I love science. When I was in school I thought I'd become a scientist. Fast Grants was a project that we started during COVID to rapidly distribute funding to scientists trying to repurpose their work for things relevant to the pandemic. It was started because the traditional legacy institutions, the funding bodies that would normally support this kind of work, were too slow to adapt. The premise of Fast Grants is we made funding decisions in 48 hours rather than in the months that one of these existing bodies would normally take. We ended up funding a bunch of work that ended up being quite important. My favorite one is in the beginning we were getting these swabs tickling our brain cells. One of the projects that Fast Grants funded showed that saliva tests work just as well. And so we were able to switch to those. And then the Arc Institute, which I founded with my wife, who by the way I met at the European Young Scientist competition, is a nonprofit organization focused on biology. There are two ideas behind it. One, we're trying to bring the possibilities of AI to biology, which requires different ways of organizing. And secondly, we're trying to cure a complex disease. We don't have time to go into all the details, but you can divide human diseases into three categories. There are infectious diseases like COVID, the flu, the cold. There are monogenic diseases like Huntington's, where there's one genetic variant you can screen for. And then pretty much everything else is a complex disease. There's some interaction between the environment and your genes, and some complicated process. So most cancers, most neurological diseases, most autoimmune diseases, etc. Humanity has never cured a complex disease. We've worked really hard. We've made amazing breakthroughs in medicine. We've never cured a single complex disease. And so with Arc, we don't know if it's going to work, but the goal is to try. We started it four years ago. Check back in year 10 maybe and we'll be able to give a proper update.
Great. I mean I'm very thankful for the saliva tests by the way. So outside of the complexities and the immediate work the Arc Institute is doing, are there any big scientific or technological challenges that you find yourself excited about solving or you could give to people in this room to solve?
There are so many. The mental model that I had when I was in school was that we kind of understand all the things and it's really fun to learn about them and to maybe come to understand how our understanding developed. But we've largely checked the boxes. When you get deeper into it, I think it's much closer to we don't know anything. We don't know why people sleep. We don't know how sleep works. It's one of the most basic phenomena in the existence of humanity. We spend a third of our time doing this thing and we don't know what's going on. I was recently thinking about thunderstorms and I realized I didn't have a great understanding of what exactly is going on in a thunderstorm. As you dig into it, you realize we don't really know exactly why thunderstorms form. We can see all these things about static electricity and lightning, but if thunderstorms didn't exist, we don't know enough to predict them. So the right mental model is much more this beginner's mind. Humanity is still much closer to the starting line. It's bad news in the sense that we haven't solved the cold, one of the most basic afflictions of our existence. So it's kind of bad news that we're still in the starting blocks. But the good news is if you're ever worried that all the big problems have been solved, no, absolutely not. Nothing's been solved. Everything is still in play.
