Ann Makosinski is of Filipino, Polish and Canadian descent. She studied science at St. Michaels University School where, in her seventh year of studies, she invented a radio that could be powered by the heat of a candle and created a piezoelectric flashlight. In 2013, Ann Makosinski won the Google Science Fair with Hollow Flashlight, a thermoelectric flashlight, inspired by her trips to the Philippines, her mother's homeland, where she saw her friends fail in high school for lack of light to study at night. The device is based on the Thermoelectric effect, using Peltier tiles, which generate light from the heat of the hand alone. She won a gold medal at the Canada-Wide Science Fair, and then several awards at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. She was voted Popular Science Young Inventor of the Year 2016 thanks to her eDrink mug, which draws heat from the drink to charge a phone. Ann Makosinski won $50,000 investment from the Quest Climate Grant for her inventions. Her interventions at TEDx in Richmond and Victoria were followed by more than 2 million spectators. In 2017, Ann Makosinski was added to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. She is now a student at the University of British Columbia and the founder of Makotronics Enterprises.