🇩🇪 Anna Amelie Fleck

The material

FleckProtec is described as a liquid that transforms into an ultra-flexible solid, protecting athletes from injury while maintaining freedom of movement. The starch base is the unusual part: a protective material built from one of the cheapest and most widely available organic compounds there is.

The behaviour it depends on is familiar to anyone who has stirred cornflour into water. A suspension of that kind flows under slow pressure and resists sharply under a sudden blow, which is exactly the property a protective pad needs — soft while a wearer moves, rigid at the moment of impact.

Why that beats foam

Conventional padding solves the problem by being permanently stiff, and everything a wearer gives up follows from that: bulk, heat, restricted movement, and the temptation to leave the protection off. Athletes who find armour uncomfortable stop wearing it, which makes comfort a safety feature rather than a luxury.

A material that is only rigid when it needs to be removes that trade-off in principle. The contest reporting records the claim and the prize; it does not publish impact test figures, standards testing or product data, so the performance behind the description is not on the record here.

Shear-thickening materials have been studied for exactly this application in sports and protective clothing, and the engineering question is rarely whether the effect exists. It is whether a material can be made to perform consistently, survive repeated impacts and washing, and be manufactured at a price that a piece of sports equipment can carry.

A brother-and-sister first prize

The Flecks entered as a pair, aged 20 and 16, and took one of the three first prizes awarded at EUCYS 2018. The name of the project carries the family name, which suggests a long-running effort rather than a single season's work — though no source here dates its beginning.

The other two first prizes went to Canadians: Brendon Matusch, 15, for an autonomous vehicle controlled by neural networks, and Nicolas Fedrigo, 17, for a redesigned tool to guide screw placement in spinal fusion surgery.

Sibling teams are not unusual at EUCYS, where entrants arrive through national competitions that accept groups as well as individuals. What is less usual is a four-year age gap spanning school and university, which means the pair were working across two very different sets of resources and constraints.

The contest

EUCYS gathers national competition winners once a year. The 2018 edition was held at Dublin Castle, with results announced on 18 September, and it brought 139 students from 38 countries presenting 90 projects.

Second and third prizes went to entrants from France, Estonia, Portugal, Georgia, South Korea and China; Ireland's Simon Meehan took the Expo Sciences Luxembourg prize. European Commissioner Carlos Moedas said of the field: "It's encouraging to see so much talent in these young researchers and innovators. They are Europe's future."

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the shared first prize and its value, her age and her brother's, their country, the project name and its description, and the date and venue.

Open: her school, the German competition the project came through, any patent or commercial development, testing data, and what she has done since September 2018. None of that is in the sources gathered for this page.