December 2015 NUI Galway Student Wins International Undergraduate Award

Winners selected from over 5,000 submissions from 255 institutions worldwide

NUI Galway student, Jonathan O’Rourke has been awarded a 2015 Undergraduate Award, an international academic awards programme that identifies top students across the globe through their innovative undergraduate research. A further ten NUI Galway students were highly commended, ranking in the top 10% of submissions internationally. Overall NUI Galway ranked in the top 30 for its student performance in the 2015 UA programme.

Cited as the ultimate champion of high-potential undergraduates, and often referred to as a “Junior Nobel Prize”, The Undergraduate Awards is the world’s largest academic awards programme, recognising excellent research and original work across the sciences, humanities, business and creative arts.

Jonathan O’Rourke, from Tramore, Co. Waterford, was announced winner of the Undergraduate Award in the Classical Studies & Archaeology Category for his paper entitled Self and the Other: The Construction of Barbarian Identity in Antiquity.

The Undergraduate Awards 2015 programme received 5,117 submissions from undergraduates in 255 universities across 39 countries. Winners are the top performers in each of the 25 category.

Louise Hodgson, Executive Director of The Undergraduate Awards, said: “This is a fantastic achievement for NUI Galway and its undergraduates. This year saw an NUI Galway student take first prize in this category for the second year in a row. Only the very top students from each university can submit their coursework, and The Undergraduate Awards identifies the very best of the best. With over 5,000 submissions from so many universities this year, the competition was extremely tough. Congratulations to all our 2015 Winners and Highly Commended Entrants.”

Highly Commended entrants were brought together to meet their fellow awardees at the annual UA Global Summit in Dublin recently. The Summit was addressed by the philosopher AC Grayling, physicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, human genome sequencer Craig Venter, and the world’s youngest professor, Dr Alia Sabur, among many more speakers and facilitators.

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