A Turkish Youth Achieves Great Success: Among the World's Brightest 100 Students

Mert Özkardeş's story, who achieved international success with a seismic safety project he developed at just 16, shows how family support, social awareness, and perseverance can change a young person's life.

Born in 2008 in İzmir as the first child of a family with two children, Özkardeş spent his childhood and teenage years in İzmir, Van, and Boston. Due to his mother's assignment, Özkardeş lived in Van for a time, and his family became his greatest support throughout that journey. Despite health problems, the support of his grandfather, who cared for his grandson, and his grandmother, who traveled with him to Van on the other side of the country, carved a special place in the young entrepreneur's life.

According to information gathered by Özlem Özgüt Yörekli, U.S. Post New York Representative, the foundation of Özkardeş's work on seismic safety lies in a personally devastating experience he endured. During the 2020 İzmir earthquake, Özkardeş, alone at home, still cannot forget the moment he descended the stairs with his pet bird in hand. Although the quake ended, the tremors he felt continued in his subconscious for months.

During this period, he developed a project idea inspired by the thought, 'I wish there were a system that would notify us when an earthquake occurs.' However, at the time he was preparing for the High School Transition System exam, so he couldn't focus enough on his work. Nevertheless, he did not abandon the idea and noted it aside.

A life changed in a sentence

The earthquakes centered in Kahramanmaraş that occurred on 6 February 2023 became one of the turning points in Mert Özkardeş's life. While participating in relief work, the young man, one night while packing aid kits, asked his uncle, a geology engineer from Hatay, about the situation in the region.

His uncle's words, 'People are dying, we can't do anything,' created a deep sense of helplessness in Özkardeş. Struggling to sleep and eat for days, Özkardeş decided that he needed to undertake concrete work in earthquake safety.

While reviewing a report published by TMMOB, he recalled the project idea he had noted in 2020. He thought that his system could do more than just issue earthquake warnings; by analyzing buildings' shake data, it could help identify structural risks without performing column tests.

Such a system required an accelerometer in every home. Realizing that this would create a serious cost nationwide, Özkardeş found the solution in people's pockets: smartphones. By leveraging the sensors in phones, he began working on a model that could both protect users during earthquakes and evaluate buildings' shake data.

Through surveys, he investigated whether the system would resonate with users. By designing a win-win model in which users bought the system for their own safety and the data collected turned into broader societal benefit, he developed a solution to the project's cost problem.

Safer rooms with artificial intelligence

According to Mert Özkardeş, earthquake safety was not limited to a building's resilience. The layout of homes and rooms also played a vital role during disasters. Therefore, he added to his project a system that automatically arranges items in rooms taking earthquake safety into account.

Thinking that the proposed arrangements should also meet users' aesthetic expectations, Özkardeş trained an artificial‑intelligence model to combine safety with visual appeal. Thus the project became a comprehensive system that brings together components such as earthquake alerts, structural risk analysis, and safe‑room configuration.

Including several friends in the project, Özkardeş applied with his work to the TÜBİTAK 2204‑A High‑School Students Research Projects Competition. Although he was not invited to the regional exhibition, the result did not deter him. He also submitted the same work to the international Rise program that supports young people's projects on social issues.

The application re‑prepared in one day

The application process was quite arduous for Mert Özkardeş. On 16 January he received negative feedback on the Rise videos; the last day for both Rise and TÜBİTAK submissions was 17 January. Working through the night to complete both applications fully, Özkardeş re‑prepared his entire file from scratch in a single day.

He had to correct his application videos eight times because personal information appeared accidentally. In moments when he considered giving up, he recalled his late grandfather's words: 'You are very strong; you can achieve anything.'

After months of effort, on 16 April he learned that he was one of 500 Rise finalists selected from different countries around the world. Despite competing against older candidates, his advancement to the final created great joy in his family.

During the finalist process, candidates were asked to document their achievements both inside and outside the school. Özkardeş says that he and his fellow finalists, Naz Sarıkaya, supported each other within ethical boundaries. The young man, who completed his finalist profile on 1 May 2024, studied more than usual to prevent the intensive application process from affecting his coursework.

On 15 June 2024, he attended the finalist interview that would largely determine the program's outcome. His teachers from Bahçeşehir College, where he studies, supported Özkardeş by listening to his presentations, sharing their comments, and standing by him during the preparation process.

Among the world's brightest 100 students

A long, stressful wait ended on 17 September 2024. While at school, Mert Özkardeş learned that the results had been announced and that he had been selected as one of the world's brightest 100 students. The young man, unable to react in the moment of astonishment, was greeted by a surprise prepared by his family when he returned home that evening. His great-grandmother, aunts, uncles, brother, and cousins celebrated this significant achievement together.

Thanks to the scholarship that covered his tuition, Özkardeş later attended a two‑week summit hosted by Oxford University. There he delivered a speech on human rights and exchanged views with young entrepreneurs from different countries about cultures, social issues, and solutions.

Now, a new journey of roughly 10,000 kilometres lies ahead. Mert Özkardeş is preparing to go to the University of California, Berkeley this year to study computer engineering.

The young entrepreneur who aims to start his own company in the future wants to develop technological systems that will make people's lives easier. Özkardeş, who turned the fear he experienced during the earthquake into a project that produces social benefit, summarizes his journey with the following thought:

"There are still many problems in the world that need to be solved, and I have bigger goals ahead of me. I will continue to produce and contribute to society throughout my life."