The project
The winning entry, as the Irish Examiner's later survey of past winners records it, was tennis sensor data analysis: instrumenting the sport and reading what the numbers say about a stroke. The Irish Times covered the award on 14 January 2011 under a tennis pun, a sign of how legible the project was to a general audience.
Sensor-driven analysis of athletic movement is now an ordinary part of professional sport. In 2011, for a secondary school student in Dublin working without a laboratory behind him, it was an unusual choice of subject and an unusually modern one.
From Dublin to Europe
The Young Scientist of the Year title carries a place at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists, the continental competition that draws national winners from across the EU. Amini did not merely attend. The Irish Examiner records that his project took the EUCYS first prize and an honorary award.
Winning the Irish exhibition and then the European contest in the same cycle is the maximum available to a school-age scientist in Ireland, and it is rare: most national winners return from EUCYS with nothing.
The competition's record
The BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition has run since 1965 and its winners' list is followed in Ireland the way sports records are followed elsewhere. Sarah Flannery won it in 1999 for cryptography; Patrick Collison won in 2005 and co-founded Stripe; Luke Drury, who won in 1969, became an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics.
The Irish Examiner assembled that list in 2014 precisely because the question of what happens to teenage prizewinners is the interesting one. Its answer, across five decades, is that a large share of them end up in research or in technology, usually after a degree at a well-known university.
Where the record leads
By 2014, three years after his win, the Irish Examiner reported that Amini was studying computer science and electrical engineering at MIT. That is the last dated fact about him in the sources used here.
The research file for this page notes, from memory rather than from any source, that he later became known as a lecturer in deep learning at MIT. That is not confirmed by anything consulted here and so it is not stated as fact on this page. Readers who want to check it should look for MIT's own course listings rather than rely on a summary.
What is documented, and what is not
Documented: the 2011 Young Scientist of the Year award, the school, the project subject, the EUCYS first prize and honorary award, and enrolment at MIT in computer science and electrical engineering as of 2014.
Not documented in these sources: his age or date of birth, which is why this page gives no birth year; his nationality beyond the Irish school he represented; the technical detail of the sensor work; and anything about his career after 2014. Pages that supply an age or a job title for him without a citation are guessing.
| Person | Country | Milestone | Age / Stat |
|---|
What is documented — and what is not
✓ Documented
- Won BT Young Scientist of the Year in January 2011 as a Castleknock College student
- Project was tennis sensor data analysis
- Took first prize and an honorary award at EUCYS
- Studying computer science and electrical engineering at MIT as of 2014
? Unverified, disputed or wrong
- No age or date of birth in these sources
- No confirmation here of any later teaching or research role
- The technical details of the sensor project are not described in this file
Questions people ask about Alexander Amini
What was Alexander Amini's winning project?
Tennis sensor data analysis, which won Ireland's BT Young Scientist of the Year title in January 2011.
How old is Alexander Amini?
No age or date of birth appears in the sources used here.
Which school did he attend?
Castleknock College in Dublin.
Did he win anything in Europe?
Yes. The Irish Examiner records a first prize and an honorary award at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists.
Did Alexander Amini go to MIT?
The Irish Examiner reported in 2014 that he was studying computer science and electrical engineering at MIT.
Does he teach deep learning at MIT?
The research file raises this, but no source consulted for this page confirms it, so it is not stated as fact here.
Is Alexander Amini on Wikipedia?
No standalone article is recorded for him in this file.
When did the Young Scientist exhibition begin?
1965, according to the Irish Examiner's survey of past winners.
Quick quiz: how well do you know Amini’s story?
What was Alexander Amini's 2011 project about?
Which European contest did he win first prize at?
Where was he studying in 2014?
Sources
- Game, set and match for Young Scientist — The Irish Times, 2011-01-14
- Previous Young Scientist winners: where are they now? — Irish Examiner, 2014-01-09
Checked by the Geniuses.club editorial team. Ages are given as of September 2026.
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