🇮🇪 Rhona Togher

The project that did not stop

Togher and O'Carroll's final exhibition project was a sound therapy for tinnitus — the perception of ringing or buzzing without an external source, which affects a substantial minority of adults and has no simple cure.

What they did next is the unusual part. "We commercialised the product devised in our final project and turned it into a business that we run together more than 10 years later," Togher said in 2019. Science-fair projects that survive contact with a market are rare; ones that outlast a decade are rarer still.

Tinnitus is a good example of a problem that rewards a cheap intervention. It is common, it is difficult to treat with drugs, and the therapies that do help are largely about managing how the brain attends to the sound. Sound-based therapy sits in exactly that space, which is why a schools project could plausibly address it at all.

The choice it forced

The competition also redirected their education. "We turned our project into our careers and that started with studying physics at university, which neither I nor Eimear were planning to do before our involvement with the competition," Togher said.

That detail is worth dwelling on, because it inverts the usual story. The project did not follow from a decision to study physics; the decision to study physics followed from the project. Both founders changed course because of what a school exhibition had started.

Where she was in 2019

At the time of the interview Togher was 26, co-founder and chief executive of Restored Hearing, with O'Carroll as her co-founder. The company's origin in the tinnitus sound therapy is documented; the interview does not list its full product range, its funding, its staff or its customers.

She offered one piece of advice to students considering the same route: "Most modern jobs have an aspect of technology to them. There are so many wonderful opportunities out there, so I'd encourage exploration."

The competition behind it

The BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition is among the largest science competitions in the world. BT Ireland had sponsored it for twenty years as of 2019, and for the decade before that interview it had drawn more female participants than male — a balance few science competitions can claim.

Togher appeared in a survey of exhibition alumni alongside Peter Taylor, who won three top awards for a geometry project and went on to study at Cambridge and Cornell before researching black hole physics at Dublin City University, and Heather Murphy, an engineering student whose project concerned sound-reducing paint and who attended the exhibition's business bootcamp.

Those three careers illustrate what the exhibition produces. One alumnus became an academic physicist, one an engineering student, and one a company founder — different destinations reached through the same event, which is the argument its organisers make for running it on a national scale.

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: her age in 2019, her role as chief executive and co-founder of Restored Hearing, the company's origin in a BT Young Scientist tinnitus project, her co-founder's name, and the fact that both studied physics as a consequence.

Open: the year she competed, her school, the exhibition award she won, the company's products and commercial position, and what has happened since 2019. None of that is stated in the source used here, and none of it is guessed at on this page.