Maeve Stillman, Grace Lord, Aalia Sellar and Brendan Miralles have been awarded the top prizes in The Big Bang UK Young Scientists & Engineers Competition.

Maeve Stillman, aged 15 from the St Mary’s College in Derry/Londonderry was crowned GSK UK Young Scientist of the Year for her project which focused on how activated charcoal supplements affect the absorption of everyday or common medicines like paracetamol and ramipril (used for treating high blood pressure).

Grace Lord, Aalia Sellar and Brendan Miralles, all aged 14 students from Loughborough Schools Foundation have been awarded the GSK UK Young Engineers of the Year title in The Big Bang UK Young Scientists & Engineers Competition, for their project entitled “Music Splash”.

In their project, the students created an app that uses machine learning to analyse music performance and provides feedback to help you improve.

Over 500 finalists from across the country were selected to show their ideas at The Big Bang Fair where ten were then shortlisted to pitch Dragon’s Den-style to a panel of VIP judges.

Congratulating the winner, Hilary Leevers, Chief Executive of EngineeringUK, which organises The Big Bang Competition, said:

The judges have been blown away by the quality of entries from all the finalists – not only for their brilliant new ideas but for how eloquently they spoke about them to the crowds of people at The Big Bang Fair.

Huge congratulations to Maeve and Grace, Aalia and Brendan whose innovative projects stood have seen them crowned GSK UK Young Scientist of the Year and GSK UK Young Engineers of the Year.

It certainly bodes well for the future that the engineers, scientists and inventors of tomorrow are already producing such astute and creative project work – congratulations to all those involved in bringing these ideas to The Fair.

Both winners will receive £2,000 in prize money to continue on their STEM journeys.

The Big Bang Competition is an annual contest designed to recognise and reward young people’s achievements in all areas of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), as well as helping them build skills and confidence in project-based work.