WASHINGTON, D.C. — A team of young Ukrainian scientists took prizes during this year’s Genius Olympiad held by the State University of New York. The five Ukrainians were among 1,450 entrants from 70 countries who took part in the competition between June 17-22 at the university’s Oswego College in the northern part of New York state.
The event has been held annually there since 2010 and Ukrainian teams have entered for the last four years said Yevhen Kudriavets, leading this group of young scholars on their U.S. visit.
The Genius Olympiad invites young people from around the world to present their projects in five categories – science, business, creative writing, robotics, and visual and performing arts – all with a focus on environmental issues.
The high school pupils from Ukraine, aged between 15 and 17, competed in the science section, which had the greatest number of entrants – some 800.
The Genius Olympiad bestows gold, silver, bronze and honorable mention awards in each category and Ukrainian team members garnered a silver and two honorable mentions.
Kudriavets is the deputy director for international relations at the Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. It is funded by the Ukrainian government and encourages young people to pursue studies in various fields of science.
He said that in 2018 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) recognized the value of the Junior Academy’s work by giving it the status of a center for scientific education.
Sifting out the geniuses
The Junior Academy, with headquarters in Kyiv, gives pupils the opportunity to take extra classes and conduct experimental work at well-equipped laboratories out of regular school hours at local establishments around Ukraine.
The pupils chosen for the international competitions undergo a selection process which begins with some 120,000 pupils from all over Ukraine entering scientific projects that they have created and developed.
The 30,000 most successful entrants from local (town and city) level competitions proceed onto the next stage of regional competitions which further whittle the number down to 1200 finalists for the Ukrainian National Science Competition, which this year was in May.
The most successful of those form the pool from which groups, such as the five students who went to Oswego College, are selected to represent the Junior Academy in some 20 competitions around the world.
The working language for most of the competitions is English, which all the young candidates speak well.
Kudriavets, who also serves on an advisory committee for Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science, and is one of the country’s representatives for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, said the competitions open up new possibilities for the young people taking part and show them that Ukraine is part of a large world that is accessible to them.
“They learn to communicate with foreigners, and by that I don’t mean just speaking a foreign language. It’s an opportunity for them to talk to people of various religions and cultures, they make friends with people from around the world so that in the future when they travel they have contacts in, say, London or New York,” he said.
“They see that the world is very tightly connected; that they can work on projects together with students from Japan, the Czech Republic, Brazil for instance and that in just eight hours you can be 10,000 kilometers away and see completely different things.”
Educational diplomacy for Ukraine
He said that the notion is widespread in Ukraine that to get on in life one has to be involved in business or money-spinning schemes. The Junior Academy and exposure to international science events shows young people, said Kudriavets, the opportunities and benefits science has to offer in terms of personal achievement, and fascinating and lucrative careers.
Kudriavets said that the competition programs always involve some social events where the teams have stands, display their flags, and explain about their countries, cultures, and histories. The Ukrainian stands always receive a multitude of visitors and questions and he believes the interactions perform a valuable form of “educational diplomacy” for Ukraine.
He said: “We do not ask for favors to take part in the events. We are fully paid-up members and by the quality of our young people’s projects we demonstrate that we can match everybody else. We thus present Ukraine in a new, confident light.”
The Kyiv Post met Kudriavets, two other members of the academy and the five-strong team on June 27, when they visited Washington D.C. before returning to Ukraine.
They had been invited by two professors, Andrei Afanasev and Leo Chalupa, at the Department of Physics at George Washington University in the American capital, and Ukrainian-American Nobel laureate Dr. Eugene Stakhiv, a co-recipient of the prize in 2009 for his work on climate change.
Prior to coming to Washington, the group had been hosted by the American space agency NASA in Houston, Texas, and met with scientists involved in designing experiments for the international space station.
The Ukrainians also went to New York City where they visited the United Nations building as well as museums of mathematics and natural history.
The team members were Maksym Lishchynskyi, 17, from Chernivtsi, Nadiia Kasianchuk, 17, from Ternopil, Milana Brodovska, 16, from Odesa, who received an honorable mention, Andrii Horbonos, 15, from Dnipro, who won a silver award, and Petro Voloshyn, 17, from Ternopil, who also gained an honorable mention.
At George Washington University they briefly described their projects which all involved innovative and sophisticated ideas geared to producing products or procedures that were also friendly to the Earth’s environment.
The projects covered such fields as solar energy, the molecular systems of bivalve mollusks, natural, non-polluting industrial dyes, advanced nickel-aluminum batteries, and the implementation of quantum algorithms in photonic (related to light generation and detection) devices.
Maksym Lishcynskyi said that judges talked with each contestant about their projects which were then assessed by a jury: “The atmosphere is very friendly. Nobody feels any great stress. There is a spirit of competition but it’s friendly competition.”
Petro Voloshyn said that, like for the others, it was his first time in the U.S. or at an international competition, and he was returning to Ukraine with an array of powerful impressions.
“The most memorable experience was bonding with people from other countries: we exchanged souvenirs and little gifts, we found out about each other and swapped contact details so the we can keep in touch. I think that’s very valuable.”
Before they left the university, the group visited a room there which contains the desk used by nuclear scientist George Gamow, who was born as Gyorgy Antonovich Gamow in Odesa in 1904.
He fled the Soviet Union in 1933 and arrived at George Washington University in 1934. He spent 22 years there and gained world fame for his “Big Bang” theory of cosmic evolution, his pivotal contribution to the invention of the hydrogen bomb and much other groundbreaking work in the fields of astrophysics and nuclear science.
