April 28, 2008
Bioengineers did well again this year in the annual Bears Breaking Boundaries innovation contests, taking prizes in at least four of the nine campus or multi-campus contests. Each winning proposal for an innovative research project or pilot program receives a grant of seed money to put their idea into action.
BioE and Mechanical Engineering Professor Boris Rubinsky’s team won first prize in the annual CITRIS Information Technology for Society White Paper Competition.
The team, which included Antoni Ivorra and Charlotte Daniels, was awarded the first prize of $15,000 for their Minimally Obtrusive Wearable Device for Continuous Interactive Cognitive and Neurological Assessment. Their project demonstrates the feasibility of a minimally obtrusive wearable system that can assess cognitive performance continuously throughout normal life activities by excitation of the peripheral nervous system and detection of the central nervous system response.
A team of BioE students researchers Tanner Nevill, Frankie Myers, David Liang, Octavian Florescu, and Rich Henrikson won an Idea Labs prize for their POC-Dx
proposal for miniaturized disease diagnosis devices designed to be inexpensive, portable and field-ready with high sensitivity and specificity.
Another BioE team of graduate students Rick Henrikson†, Hansang Cho, and Frankie Myers won the Neglected Diseases Big Ideas contest for their Modular Riboswitch Diagnostics proposal, a portable microfluidics system for early disease detection and monitoring.
Also, a proposal co-authored by BioE graduate student Wilbur Lam won first place in the Synthetic Biology contest with their plan for engineering synthetic blood platelets.
To read more go to the Bears Breaking Boundaries Contest .