🇸🇰 Filip Lajčiak

Filip Lajčiak studies at the Stredná priemyselná škola — the Secondary Industrial School — in Dubnica nad Váhom, an industrial town in Slovakia's Váh river valley. He reached the world stage through AMAVET, the Slovak association of science and technology clubs whose science-fair network selects the country's representatives for international competition, and which proudly announced that its science talent had 'again' become a world winner in the USA.

The word 'again' matters: Filip's older brother, Michal Lajčiak, won an award at the same competition in 2024, making the Lajčiak household of Dubnica nad Váhom a two-time producer of ISEF winners — a rarity anywhere, let alone in a country of five and a half million.

Filip's project, 'A Novel Stereo Vision 3D Scanning System for Microscopic Samples,' is an embedded-systems answer to a laboratory problem: how to capture tiny specimens in three dimensions. His stereoscopic scanning system is designed to image microscopic samples, combining twin-camera stereo vision with the hardware and software engineering needed to make the measurements precise at that scale, as reported by Slovakia's STVR public broadcaster.

At Regeneron ISEF 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona — where more than 1,700 finalists from 64 countries competed for over $7 million in awards from May 9–15 — Filip won first place in the Embedded Systems category, sponsored by Jane Street, a First Award carrying $6,000. The Society for Science listed him as the category's sole winner, one of just 22 first-place category finishes at the fair.

The judges then added a second, more exclusive honor: the Dudley R. Herschbach SIYSS Award, which Filip shared with American chemistry winner Benedikt Kienle. Named for the Nobel laureate chemist, the award sends its recipients to the Stockholm International Youth Science Seminar in Sweden during Nobel Prize week — a gathering where young scientists present their research and attend the Nobel ceremonies in December.

News of the win travelled fast at home. STVR's Radio Slovakia International carried the story from the TASR agency; the national daily Pravda profiled the 'scientific talent from Slovakia' who succeeded in the USA; and AMAVET and the popular-science magazine Quark celebrated the second consecutive triumph for its programme. For a student from a regional industrial school, first place at the world's biggest young-science fair — plus a seat at Nobel Week — is the kind of result that reshapes what Slovak students believe is reachable.