Students from Austria, Denmark and Germany took the top awards at the 16th EU Contest for Young Scientists. The two Irish projects did not feature in the top nine places, but three Belfast students representing the UK received a Marine Institute Award for their biology project.
The annual event was this year held for the first time in Ireland. An international panel of judges spent three days interviewing the 102 students from 34 countries.
The Tánaiste, Ms Harney, who presented the awards, invited the students to consider research opportunities in the Republic.
The top nine awards this year shared a €28,000 prize fund. Ms Harney was presented with a copy of the "Dublin Declaration" on the environment, agreed by the students during the contest.
Three first, three second and three third prizes, worth €5,000, €3,000 and €1,500 respectively, were awarded.
Martin Knobel, Gerhard Schony and Florian Grossbacher from Austria claimed a first prize with their project on microphone manufacturing. Typically, condenser microphones are prepared by hand but the three students developed a novel way to automate this process.
Charlotte Strandkvist, from Denmark, took a first place with her impressive chemistry project that explained a new method for synthesising Prozac, one of the most commonly used antidepressant drugs.
Her approach eliminates the need for dangerous chemicals but also improves the drug yield during manufacture.
The third first place winner was Mario Chemnitz from Germany, who developed a low-cost gas chromatograph. These devices, used for chemical analysis, are typically too expensive for use in a school lab, but Mario came up with a new design that uses an ultrasonic detector to analyse gas mixtures.
