Humans of YSI: Cian Fogarty

Young Social Innovators Turns 25!

As Young Social Innovators celebrates 25 years of youth-led change, #HumansOfYSI continues to spotlight the people behind 190,000 changemakers.

This week, we hear from a former participant whose journey began with a simple question and led to the world stage.

Third Feature: Cian Fogarty

YSI Year: 2013
School: Tullamore College
Project: Greener Globe

Briefly describe your YSI project. What issue were you trying to address?
Greener Globe started as a Transition Year project at Tullamore College in 2013, born out of a simple but urgent question:

Why are we so careless with the world's most valuable resource?

We were tackling water wastage, specifically the amount of water people unknowingly use through in the shower every day. At the time, Ireland was deep in the water charges debate, and it struck us that the real problem wasn't the charges themselves. The real problem was that people had no way of knowing how long they'd been showering, or what that actually cost them environmentally and financially.

Our response was Aquacica, a kinetically-powered LED showerhead that works like a traffic light; green when you start, amber at five minutes, red at seven. No batteries, universal fit, and an immediate visual cue that speaks a language everyone already understands. It was a simple, intuitive, and designed to change behaviour without requiring any effort from the user.

At its core, Greener Globe was about making the sustainable choice the easy choice. Water scarcity is a growing global crisis, and we believed (and still do believe) that meaningful change starts with the small decisions people make every single day.

Standout memory from YSI experience:
There are so many moments that stand out, but one that I will always hold dear was representing Ireland at the SAGE World Cup.

Being chosen through the YSI programme to compete on that stage was already surreal. We were just young kids from Tullamore with an idea we'd scribbled out during Transition Year, and suddenly we were representing our country against student entrepreneurs from across the globe. The weight of that wasn't lost on us.

And then we won.

It's hard to fully articulate what that moment meant. Not just the personal pride of it, but what it unlocked. Winning the SAGE World Cup gave Greener Globe a credibility and visibility that would have taken years to build any other way. It opened doors in industry, gave us a platform to speak to retailers, investors and accelerators, and gave us the confidence to back ourselves fully. It was the moment Greener Globe stopped feeling like a school project and started feeling like a real business.

None of that happens without YSI. The programme gave us the structure, the mentorship and the belief to get there in the first place. Winning the World Cup was our moment, but YSI was the launchpad.

“YSI Made Me…”
A Global Entrepreneur.

What are you doing now?
Since Greener Globe, the entrepreneurial bug never left. I went on to study a PhD in Physics and then an MSc in Engineering, Technology and Entrepreneurship. I spent time building product for some of the most innovative technology companies in the world in Silicon Valley before deciding forge my own path forward again in entrepreneurship.

I'm currently the founder of Astrolabe, a space medicine company. We're working at the intersection of two fields I'm deeply passionate about: human health and space exploration. As we move closer to long-duration spaceflight and a permanent human presence beyond Earth, the medical challenges that come with that are immense and largely unsolved. That's the problem we're solving for through innovative technology.

It's a long way from a showerhead, but the instinct is exactly the same. Find a real problem, back yourself, and build something that matters.

Do you see any connection between your YSI experience and where you are today?

That instinct has shaped many of the professional decision I've made since. Astrolabe exists because I looked at the future of human spaceflight and saw a critical, unsolved problem. That's the same lens I was using at the back of a classroom in Tullamore College when ideating Greener Globe.

There's also something to be said for what winning the SAGE World Cup did to my sense of what's possible. When you compete on a global stage at that age and come away with the win, it recalibrates your ambition permanently. 

It showed me that a kid from Offaly can go toe-to-toe with anyone in the world, and that's not a small thing to carry with you into a career in deep tech entrepreneurship.

Impact participating in YSI had personally:
I was young, curious, and full of ideas but without any real framework for what to do with them. YSI gave me that framework.

On a personal level, it built a confidence in me. A quiet belief that I could figure things out, that I could stand in a room with experienced business people or compete on a world stage and hold my own. That kind of self-belief, developed early, compounds over time in ways that are hard to overstate.

It also shaped how I think about problems. YSI pushed us to look at the world and ask ""what's broken, and what can I do about it?"" That's a habit of mind I've never switched off.

More than anything though, it showed me what I was. I wasn't just a student who was good at science or interested in business. I was an entrepreneur. YSI gave me the language and the proof point to own that identity at an age when most people are still figuring out who they are. That's an extraordinary thing to give a young person.

Skills or values from YSI that stay with you today:

• Problem-first thinking. YSI drilled into us that the idea is nothing without the problem. You don't start with a product, you start with a pain point. That sounds obvious, but it's genuinely rare, and it's something I apply every single day at Astrolabe.
• Resilience. Building something from scratch as a teenager, pitching to judges, competing internationally, none of it goes smoothly. YSI put us in uncomfortable situations constantly, and you either learn to embrace that discomfort or you don't last long as an entrepreneur. I learned early that setbacks are just part of the process.
• The courage to back unconventional ideas. Space medicine isn't an obvious path for a kid from Offaly. Neither was a kinetically-powered LED showerhead in 2013. YSI normalised the idea of pursuing something bold and a little unexpected.

Advice to young people starting their YSI journey now:
Take the problem more seriously than the idea.

Everyone comes in excited about what they want to build. The ones who go furthest are the ones who fall in love with the problem instead. A great idea built on a shaky problem will collapse. A simple idea built on a real, urgent problem can change the world.

Don't wait until you feel ready. You won't feel ready. Nobody does. The whole point of YSI is that it meets you where you are and pushes you further than you thought you could go. Let it. 

Take it seriously, but not so seriously that you forget to enjoy it. You're being given a rare and genuinely special opportunity. The connections you make, the confidence you build, and the way it shapes how you see the world - that stuff stays with you for life.

At Young Social Innovators, we’ve always believed in the power of young people to lead change. Cian’s journey from a Transition Year project on water conservation to founding a space medicine company, is a reminder of what happens when curiosity and opportunity meet.

It’s a story of growth and impact, of a young person discovering they’re not just capable of ideas, but of shaping the world. And it’s exactly why we do what we do, because supporting young people today plants the seeds for the changemakers of tomorrow.

We couldn’t be prouder!!