Aleksandrs Jesiļevskis, a 12th-grade student at Riga Technical University (RTU) Engineering High School, won a bronze medal at the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics (IOAA) in Hanoi, Vietnam, which brought together 320 students from 66 countries and territories. He finished just three points short of silver.
It is his second medal in a row, after competing in Mumbai, India, in 2025. An amateur astronomer for at least ten years, he started with popular science books and went on to observe the sky with his own telescope; he even tries to calculate asteroid orbits from his observations.
Also interested in electronics, he is considering electrical power engineering, focusing on high-voltage grids and solar power integration, and is weighing universities in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.
