The project
The work began with a bacterium already familiar to farmers. Rhizobium fixes nitrogen in the root nodules of legumes; the question the students asked was whether treating cereal seed with it would do anything useful for crops that do not form those nodules. The answer, in their trials, was that it accelerated germination and increased yield in barley and oats.
Émer Hickey worked with Ciara Judge and Sophie Healy-Thow. The three had already won the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition outright in 2013, the Irish competition that has served as the country's proving ground for teenage research for six decades. The Google Science Fair grand prize followed in 2014, against entries from around the world.
What the prize did
TIME named her among its 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014, in the same list as musicians and athletes. It is an odd category to enter through a barley trial, and it measures attention rather than significance — but attention is precisely what a global science prize converts into opportunity for a seventeen-year-old from a rural Irish school.
The Irish Examiner had already been tracking the alumni question in January 2014, running a "where are they now" survey of past Young Scientist winners. The honest answer for most of them is that the trail goes cold. That makes the follow-up on this cohort unusually useful.
Where Émer Hickey is now
The record used here places her, in 2025, as a postdoctoral research fellow at the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology — a research institute concerned with fungal disease in humans, a field with little public profile and considerable clinical weight.
The distance from her school project is worth stating plainly: crop microbiology at seventeen, human fungal pathogens at twenty-eight. What carried over is not the subject but the method — controlled trials, measured outcomes, and the patience to run them until the numbers mean something. Silicon Republic cited the cohort in January 2025 in an assessment of what the BT Young Scientist pipeline actually produces.
What is documented — and what is not
Documented: the 2014 Google Science Fair grand prize, shared with Ciara Judge and Sophie Healy-Thow, for work on nitrogen-fixing bacteria and cereal yields; the 2013 BT Young Scientist overall win; her school, Kinsale Community School; her place on TIME's 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014; and a postdoctoral fellowship at the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology as of 2025.
Not documented in the sources used here: her date of birth; her undergraduate and doctoral degrees and where she took them; the title and subject of her doctoral work; and whether the crop findings were ever taken up commercially or published in a peer-reviewed journal. That last gap matters: a science-fair result is a beginning, not a finding, until it survives review.
Why the follow-through is the story
Teenage science competitions generate an enormous quantity of coverage and a small quantity of durable work. The structural reason is simple: a fair rewards a self-contained project completed in a school year, while research rewards a question pursued for a decade. The two rarely align, and most prize-winners move on to something else entirely.
Hickey's case is interesting precisely because the direction held. She won the largest prize available to a school-age scientist and then did the unglamorous thing — a degree, a doctorate, a postdoctoral position in a specialised field — rather than converting the attention into a public profile. For a reader trying to judge what teenage science prizes are worth, that trajectory is more informative than the prize itself.
Watch: Émer Hickey on camera
| Person | Country | Milestone | Age / Stat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rishi Shiv Prasanna | India | Winning the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar in 2023 at eight, for… | Age 0 |
| Cannan Huey-You | United States | Presenting research on a Milky Way gas cloud at the American Astronomical… | Age 11 |
| Ángela Olazarán Laureano | Mexico | An AI medical assistant built in Veracruz, designed to work where there is | Age 14 |
| Émer Hickey | Ireland | Co-winning the 2014 Google Science Fair grand prize | Age 16 |
| Sophie Healy-Thow | Ireland | Co-winning the Google Science Fair grand prize in 2014 | Age 16 |
What is documented — and what is not
✓ Documented
- Co-won the 2014 Google Science Fair grand prize at seventeen with Ciara Judge and Sophie Healy-Thow.
- The project concerned nitrogen-fixing bacteria and their effect on barley and oat germination and yield.
- Named by TIME among its 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014.
- Recorded as a postdoctoral research fellow at the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology in 2025.
? Unverified, disputed or wrong
- Her date of birth is not published in the sources used here.
- Her degrees, doctoral subject and institutions are not documented on this page.
- Whether the crop findings were peer-reviewed or commercialised is not established.
- The 2013 BT Young Scientist win is carried from the research record rather than from a contemporaneous report read here.
Questions people ask about Émer Hickey
What did Émer Hickey win?
The grand prize at the 2014 Google Science Fair, shared with Ciara Judge and Sophie Healy-Thow, for work on nitrogen-fixing bacteria and cereal crop yields.
How old was she?
Seventeen at the time of the 2014 Google Science Fair win.
What was the project about?
Treating cereal seed with a nitrogen-fixing bacterium, which in their trials sped germination and increased yields in barley and oats.
Where is Émer Hickey now?
The record used here places her as a postdoctoral research fellow at the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology as of 2025.
Who were her teammates?
Ciara Judge and Sophie Healy-Thow, with whom she also won the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2013.
Was she on a TIME list?
Yes. TIME named her among its 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014, published on 13 October 2014.
Is Émer Hickey on Wikipedia?
No standalone Wikipedia article about her is recorded here; the record rests on TIME, the Irish Examiner and Silicon Republic.
Quick quiz: how well do you know Émer’s story?
What did Émer Hickey's winning project study?
Which prize did the team win in 2014?
What field does she work in now?
Sources
- The 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014 — TIME, 2014-10-13
- Previous Young Scientist winners: where are they now? — Irish Examiner, 2014-01-09
- Success stories: How BTYSTE creates future innovators — Silicon Republic, 2025-01-08
Checked by the Geniuses.club editorial team. Ages are given as of September 2026.
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