This post was written by Hatchet reporter Kelly Quinn.
Dozens of students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science pitched innovative ideas Monday during the school’s sixth annual research and development showcase but the only pair of non-engineers earned the top undergraduate prize.
Judges sized up 53 submissions that investigated topics ranging from bomb detection to voting methods, grading undergraduate and graduate competitors based on the “intellectual depth” and “broader impact” of their research, as well as their ability to clearly communicate their ideas, judge and computer science professor Evan Drumwright said.
Seniors Nathaniel Diskint and Caitlin Keating won the $2,000 award for best undergraduate research submission with a syringe that regulates the release of chemicals during injections.
The students, who are respectively biological anthropology and psychology majors, were able to compete because their faculty mentor, Michael Plesniak, is a professor in the engineering school. Their project was the only showcase submission that came from outside the engineering school.
“This $2,000 will go a long way towards developing our final prototype, finalizing the design for that and bringing it to the market,” Diskint said.
To market their product, the students plan to start a company called Imagnus Biomedical – a pitch that has gotten them to the second round of the GW Business Plan Competition. In April, eight semi-finalists for that contest will compete for $50,000 in cash and prizes.
At the graduate level, Anastasia Wengrowski and Rafael Jaimes took home the showcase’s grand prize of $5,000 for their study of the metabolism of the heart. The two first-year Ph.D. students conducted their research on rabbit hearts, which they extracted and kept alive outside each animal’s body.
The pair did not know what they would do with their prize money, and Wengrowski joked that she “would take everyone out for drinks.”
Can Korman, the engineering school’s associate dean for research and graduate studies, said one of the goals of the showcase was to “put students and faculty together.” Each group of students had a mentor with whom it worked closely and conducted research.
Korman also noted the “potential for commercialization” as an important theme of the competition, which was highlighted by the keynote address by Sid Banerjee, the CEO and co-founder of the technology consulting firm Clarabridge.