Young Romanian inventor Ionut Budisteanu, 21, currently a student in math and informatics, was named the best student of the year in Romania for 2013-2014, at the Romanian Students Abroad League gala that took place on Thursday, January 8. He received his prize from Romanian president Klaus Iohannis.

Budisteanu is already famous in the inventors’ world, after getting first prize at the Intel competition for his driver-less car project that can be built at a low cost. The young Romanian has been programming for 10 years, since he was 11, and is currently member of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2013, Time magazine ranked Budisteanu 9th among the most influential young people in the world.

The Romanian is passionate about making electronic devices and software applications, and is currently working on an industrial robot, VisionBot, which should help electronic engineers turn prototypes into industrial products. VisionBot is Budisteanu’s first start-up project. The young Romanian was already awarded the gold for his project at the National Fair of Inventions and Scientific Creation for Youth held in Bucharest in November 2014.

Ionut Budisteanu recently got accepted to attend the International event Harvard World Model United Nations that will be held in South Korea between March 16 and 20, 2015. WorldMUN moves to a new international city each year and attracts over 2,000 college and graduate students from more than 70 countries, making it the largest international collegiate-level Model UN conference in the world.

The prize for the best Romanian student abroad was awarded to Ada Raluca Pop, who last year completed a Ph.D. in computer science at MIT in the U.S., who created a data encryption program which is currently used by large companies such as Google, SAP and Lincoln Labs. She will start as a teacher at Berkeley in 2015.

editor@romania-insider.com

(photo sources: Klaus Iohannis and Ionut Budisteanu on Facebook)