One of Germany’s Highest Honors at Jugend forscht

Aarav and Viyona S. (Grade 10) have achieved an extraordinary success at the national finals of Jugend forscht, Germany’s premier STEM competition for young researchers.

After advancing through the regional competition in Augsburg and the Bavarian state competition, the siblings qualified for the national finals in Herzogenaurach, where 159 of Germany’s most promising young researchers presented their projects.

There, Aarav and Viyona received one of the competition’s highest distinctions: the “President of Germany Award for an Exceptional Research Project” (Preis des Bundespräsidenten für eine außergewöhnliche Arbeit).

Their award-winning project, “Peptide Doppelgängers: Limits of AlphaFold3 in Predicting Mirror-Image Therapeutics,” investigated the strengths and limitations of artificial intelligence in structural biology. Their research demonstrated that rare mirror-image variants of certain proteins can often be predicted more accurately using physics-based models than AI-based approaches alone—an important finding with potential implications for future drug development.

This achievement is particularly remarkable given that Aarav and Viyona, both just 14 years old, successfully competed in the senior Jugend forscht category, which is typically reserved for significantly older students.

We also extend our sincere thanks to Sabine Hollatz for mentoring the biology and biochemistry aspects of the project and to Sebastian Berk for guiding the students’ research and development work.

We congratulate Aarav and Viyona on this exceptional accomplishment and look forward to following their future scientific endeavors.

> Watch the Tagesschau news report and read the accompanying article here. Then hear directly from Aarav and Viyona in the interview below as they reflect on their research journey and success at Jugend forscht.

Photo: Pia Bayer/dpa