Alberta student who fled Ukraine wins award for landmine-detecting drone

A 17 year old who fled war-torn Ukraine and is now student at the University of Alberta has won a global prize for an invention created because of the violence he saw.

Igor Klymenko is enjoying his first year at the University of Alberta. He recently moved to Edmonton from war-torn Ukraine but his journey has been filled with ups and downs.

“When I was sheltering in the basement with my family, each day could be our last day, each morning we heard sounds of planes, of rockets and missiles flying in the sky just near our house,” Klymenko said.

Stuck in a bunker for weeks, surrounded by the horrors of war, Klymenko remembered a project he started years back. The Russian invasion inspired him to finish it.

“I started thinking about solutions for the military problems that had hard consequences but I wanted to save lives, not to take other’s lives,” Klymenko said.

He invented a drone that uses metal detectors to locate landmines and then transmits the coordinates to the user. So far he has two prototypes and is working on a third improved version.

His work has now been recognized internationally.

“The one word I thought about was persistence in the face of adversity,” said Marc Boxer, vice president of communications and policy for Chegg.

Klymenko won the 2022 Chegg.org Global Student Award, an honour that comes with a $100,000 prize.