PrintThe global knowledge society of the future seen through young eyes
The winners of NIRAS’ international essay competition have just been
announced at NIRAS’ 50th anniversary reception in Allerød.
The two winners are both engineering students. Jacob Mattingley from New
Zealand won the first prize of 16,000 Euro and Nikhil Ravi from India was
awarded the second prize of 8,000 Euro. Coincidentally both are studying at
Stanford University in California, USA.
Henrik Kærgaard is the Head of Development Across NIRAS: “Back in November
2005 we arranged an international essay competition with the title A
future, global knowledge society – what is it really? It has been
fantastic to see all the responses from young students from all over the
world. They’ve been queuing up to offer their view on the global scientific
society of the future.”
The competition was arranged via overseas universities and colleges of
higher education in 21 countries and resulted in 126 abstracts from 37
countries. 10 went on to write an essay and of these two were selected from
New Zealand and India.
The panel of judges for the competition consisted of Professor Wojciech
Bienkowski from Poland, Professor Nina Smith from Aarhus Business School
and NIRAS’ international director Karol Marcinkowski. In their remarks they
expressed the following evaluation of the two winners:
”Both winners can be characterised in the following way: their approach to
the competition was original and creative and represents a broad depth of
knowledge within many areas...
… They both exhibit imagination, performance ability and a very strong
involvement and faith in the future of humanity. One can say that they both
demonstrate a positive approach to the future.”
Henrik Kærgaard is excited about the future of the young winners: ”Both the
panel of judges and we in NIRAS are eager to see whether Jacob and Nikhil
will have the opportunity to realise their ideas and proposals. That will
be the real challenge for them: to test their own dreams as they are
expressed in their winning essays.”
Read the
two winning essays (pdf)
Read also the
Evaluation by the Panel of Judges
Yours sincerely
NIRAS
Henrik Kærgaard
Head of Development Across NIRAS