Ann Makosinski

Makosinski is of Filipino and Polish descent.^[1] Makosinski's family lives in Saanich, British Columbia.^[2] Her father is a retired lab manager with two medical patents.^[3] From a young age, she became fond of tinkering with different trinkets that she found around the house. One of her first toys was a box of transistors. She started soldering circuits by the age of 9. In sixth grade, Ann began competing in science fairs.^[4]

For her grade 7 science project, Makosinski invented a radio powered by the wasted heat from a candle. Two years later, she built a piezoelectric flashlight of her own design.^[5]

At 15, Makosinski decided to invent a light source that would not require any batteries and could be charged using the heat from the user's hand. In the end, she came up with the Hollow Flashlight,^[6] a first-of-its-kind renewable flashlight that did not require any changing of batteries or charging. Her inspiration for this idea came when a friend from the Philippines told her that she had failed a class in school because she did not have any electricity at home and could therefore not study at night. She ended up taking first place at both the Google Science Fair and Intel Science & Engineering Fair. She also showed her invention on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, gave three TEDx talks, and was on Time magazine's 30, Under 30, World Changers list all before she finished high school.

Makosinski attended the University of British Columbia from 2015 to 2018, where she studied English Literature. While at school, Makosinski became the face of Uniqlo's Heattech Fleece campaign and she also received the Sustainable Entrepreneurship Award. In 2019, Ann ventured away from her science domain of expertise and enrolled into the Herbert Berghof Studios school of acting in New York City. While in NYC Ann worked on a line of children's toys that ran on green energy, which were later profiled on CNN. She subsequently resumed her study of English literature at the University of Victoria from which she received her BA in 2021.^[7]

In 2013, Makosinski won the Google Science Fair for her invention of the thermoelectric flashlight.^[8][9] The device relies on the thermoelectric effect using Peltier tiles. It is hollow to increase convection currents.^[5] In 2018 she was in negotiations to commercially manufacture and distribute the flashlight.^[10][11] She was inspired by her mother's homeland in the Philippines, where a friend failed a course because she did not have electricity to study at night.^[9][12]

In 2013, she presented her invention at TEDx Richmond and TEDx Vancouver and won a gold medal at the Canada-Wide Science Fair.^[3][13][14] Later that year, she appeared in a Time magazine article about influential people younger than 30 years old.^[15] In 2016, she was voted the Popular Science Young Inventor of the Year.^[16]