Five Louth students recognised among the world's best undergraduates

Five students from Drogheda have been recognised at the 2026 Global Undergraduate Awards (GUA), a leading academic awards programme for undergraduate coursework. Two of them, Katelyn Sherry and Robert Finan, have been named Global Winners, the programme's highest honour, awarded to the single best undergraduate submission in each category worldwide. They are joined by a Regional Winner and two students named Highly Commended, making Drogheda one of the standout towns in this year's Irish results.

This year's Global Undergraduate Award winners represent a cohort deeply engaged with the defining challenges of their generation, from social and economic inequality and geopolitical instability to climate change, environmental sustainability and the profound transformation being driven by artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.

Their winning work reflects a generation navigating a world of rapid and uncertain change, while actively questioning the systems, structures and assumptions that will shape its future.

This sense of generational consciousness is reflected across the Drogheda winning works, which range from politics and international relations to philosophy, the visual arts and engineering, each marked by rigorous analysis, structured thinking and clarity. Their concerns speak directly to GUA's recent student survey, in which more than half of students identified social inequality as a major concern and a third highlighted geopolitical instability.

Katelyn Sherry (Trinity College Dublin) takes the Global Winner title in Politics & International Relations for research into citizenship and the political representation of ethnic minorities in London and Paris, asking who is counted and who is heard in the postcolonial city. Robert Finan (Trinity College Dublin) wins in Philosophy for his work in environmental aesthetics, examining how we frame and make sense of the natural world.

They are joined by Regional Winner Kristaps Meiers (National College of Art and Design), recognised in Visual Arts for Microplastics in the Microworlds. Two further Drogheda students were named Highly Commended: Caolum Dyas (Dundalk Institute of Technology) in Engineering, for work on intelligent arc-fault detection and real-time monitoring in low-voltage switchgear, and Czacarri Muli (National College of Art and Design) in Visual Arts.

The Global Undergraduate Awards identify and celebrate the world's top undergraduate work across a broad range of disciplines, from literature and philosophy to engineering, law, medicine and the visual arts.

Now in its programme for 2026, the Awards received submissions from students at leading universities and colleges around the world, with entries assessed by an international panel of academics and judged purely on the merit of the work.

Jim Barry, Chairman of the Global Undergraduate Awards, said: “These students are among the brightest undergraduates globally with the potential to have a significant impact on some of the world’s greatest challenges.

“The purpose of the Global Undergraduate Awards is to recognise that potential early; to identify exceptional talent at the start of a career, recognise that talent and give it a global platform, long before the wider world takes notice. This year’s Irish and other winners are tackling the questions that will define the decades ahead. We are proud to celebrate them, and to bring them together in Dublin this November.”

Winners will be celebrated at the GUA Summit and the Thomas Clarkson Gold Medal presentation, taking place in Dublin on 10th November 2026, bringing together the programme's global winners alongside academics, judges and supporters.