DCU student wins place on University of Notre Dame’s ESTEEM Masters Programme

Dublin City University student Robert Lis has been awarded a place on the Engineering, Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Excellence Masters (ESTEEM) programme at US University, Notre Dame, for the Academic Year 2014/15. The student will be supported by a fellowship from the Naughton Foundation which, every year, makes 4-5 awards to outstanding candidates from Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Dublin City University and University College Cork.

Lis has just completed a four-year Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Applications at DCU and recently finalised his final year project ‘AirMenu,’ produced with a fellow student. ‘AirMenu’ is an e-commerce product designed to redefine the experience of eating out. The program allows consumers to order and pay for food in a restaurant through the application, which takes a matter of seconds.

DCU President, Prof. Brian MacCraith, congratulated Robert Lis on his achievements:

“Robert is thoroughly deserving of his place on Notre Dame University’s ESTEEM programme. Robert has shown exceptional talent in his field throughout his time at DCU and, with the expertise that has been shared with him at the University’s School of Computing, he unquestionably has the capabilities to demonstrate his talents in a business environment. We are also delighted that Robert will be supported by the Naughton Fellowship Programme and it is through such programmes that we maintain a healthy relationship with similarly ambitious universities, such as Notre Dame, worldwide.”

The Naughton Fellowship Program in Science and Engineering, which will support Robert Lis, enables students to experience international education at one of Ireland's leading Universities or at the University of Notre Dame. The program facilitates cross-cultural experience for exceptional students with leadership potential in select fields, stimulates collaborative research among the engineers and scientists who train these students, and forges deeper and stronger ties between the host institutions and countries.

ESTEEM, meanwhile, is an innovative 11-month professional Master’s programme designed to surround individuals with a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) background in an entrepreneurial ecosystem allowing them to take university technologies from concept to market. Students are first immersed into business-related courses taught through an entrepreneurial lens followed by a very unique capstone thesis project where students develop a commercialisation plan of taking real university research to market.