[April 19, 2017] |
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Student Inventors Awarded Lemelson-MIT Student Prize
The Lemelson-MIT
Program today announced its 2017 Lemelson-MIT (News - Alert) Student
Prize winners, capping a nationwide search for the most inventive
college students. The Program awarded $115,000 in prizes to 18
undergraduate and graduate inventors, selected from a diverse and highly
competitive pool of applicants from across the country.
The Lemelson-MIT Student Prize is supported by The
Lemelson Foundation, serving as a catalyst for young inventors in
the fields of health care, transportation, food and agriculture, and
consumer devices.
2017 Winners
The "Drive it!" Lemelson-MIT Student Prize: Rewarding
technology-based inventions that can improve transportation.
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Tomás Vega Gálvez and Corten Singer, University of California,
Berkeley, $10,000 Undergraduate Team Winner
Vega and Singer
created WheelSense, a modular, customizable add-on system for
wheelchairs that provides spatial awareness for visually impaired
users to identify obstacles and ease their navigation. They hope to
disrupt the expensive market for assistive technologies for the
disabled community by making their technology open source.
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Tony Tao, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, $15,000 Graduate
Winner
Tao led the development of a small electric unmanned
aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV folds to the size of a dollar bill and
can be jettisoned from a mothership at high speeds and altitudes. The
UAV and its canister are designed to deploy in freefall and fly
autonomously to gather data and radio it back to the mothership or to
personnel on the ground. Tao's second invention, AAM architecture, has
the potential to reduce manufacturing costs and increase speed of
development of new aircraft by generating parts on demand.
The "Use it!" Lemelson-MIT Student Prize: Rewarding technology-based
inventions that can improve consumer devices.
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Chandani Doshi, Grace i, Jessica (Jialin) Shi, Chen (Bonnie) Wang,
Charlene Xia and Tania Yu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
$10,000 Undergraduate Team Winner
Doshi, Li, Shi, Wang,
Xia and Yu are developing a portable, real-time text-to-braille
converter called Tactile. The device allows people who are visually
impaired to take a picture of printed text, which is transcribed to
braille on a refreshable display.
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Apoorva Murarka, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, $15,000
Graduate Winner
Murarka invented an electrostatic transducer
that uses a 125 nanometer thick membrane - which is approximately one
thousandth the width of a human hair - to produce high-fidelity sound
more efficiently. This technology can be applied to hearing aids,
earphones, or other consumer electronic devices, resulting in superior
sound quality and longer battery life.
The "Eat it!" Lemelson-MIT Student Prize: Rewarding
technology-based inventions that can improve food and agriculture.
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Matthew Rooda and Abraham Espinoza, University of Iowa, $10,000
Undergraduate Team Winner
Rooda and Espinoza founded
SwineTech and developed SmartGuard, a real-time health analysis that
reduces the incidence of piglet mortality due to "lay-on/crushing" by
the mother pig by analyzing the crate's temperature and piglets'
squeals.
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Natasha Wright, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, $15,000
Graduate Winner
Wright invented a solar powered
desalination system for off-grid water production in communities in
India and Gaza that reduces the required amount of energy and the
amount of wasted water. She is working to provide affordable, safe
drinking water. Wright was also part of a team that developed Smart
Spout, a small, inexpensive, low energy consumption usage sensor that
measures the long-term use of household water treatment and safe
storage devices.
The "Cure it!" Lemelson-MIT Student Prize: Rewarding technology-based
inventions that can improve health care.
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Maria Filsinger Interrante, Zachary Rosenthal and Christian Choe,
Stanford University, $10,000 Undergraduate Team Winner
Filsinger
Interrante, Rosenthal and Choe developed novel protein drugs to kill
multi-drug resistant, gram-negative bacteria - or "superbugs." Their
engineered protein molecules offer a new strategy to combat an urgent
global problem projected to kill more people than cancer by 2050.
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Lisa Tostanoski, University of Maryland, $15,000 Graduate Winner
Tostanoski,
a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Jewell
lab, developed a novel method of reversing paralysis caused by
multiple sclerosis-like disease in mice. Her innovation deposits
microparticles in lymph nodes - the tissues that orchestrate immune
responses - to control the local release of regulatory immune signals
and program cells not to attack "self" tissues. This approach aims to
control autoimmunity, but eliminate the broad immunosuppressive
effects that plague current clinical MS therapies.
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Katy Olesnavage, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, $15,000
Graduate Winner
Olesnavage invented a process to create
high-performance, mass-producible, low cost prosthetic feet. Her
process optimizes the prosthetic foot in order to best replicate
typical walking.
ABOUT THE LEMELSON-MIT PROGRAM
The Lemelson-MIT Program celebrates outstanding inventors and inspires
young people to pursue creative lives and careers through invention.
Jerome H. Lemelson, one of the most prolific American inventors, and his
wife Dorothy founded the Program at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1994. It is funded by The Lemelson Foundation and
administered by the School of Engineering at MIT, an institution with a
strong ongoing commitment to creating meaningful opportunities for K-12
STEM education. For more information, visit Lemelson.MIT.edu.
ABOUT THE LEMELSON FOUNDATION
Established in the early 1990s by Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson and based
in Portland, Oregon, The Lemelson Foundation uses the power of invention
to improve lives. Inspired by the belief that invention can solve many
of the biggest economic and social challenges of our time, the
Foundation helps the next generation of inventors and invention-based
businesses to flourish. To date the Foundation has made grants totaling
over $200 million in support of its mission. For more information, visit http://lemelson.org.
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