Collegiate Inventors Receive Lemelson-MIT Student Prize

By Francine Fluetsch on April 25, 2017

The Lemelson-MIT program announced the winners of the Lemelson-MIT student prize on April 19, after a nationwide search for the most innovative college students. According to this press release, the program celebrates outstanding inventors and inspires young people to pursue creative lives and careers through innovation, and what better way to get those gears turning than to award prizes to those students who are doing exceptional work?

If you haven’t heard of it before, the Lemelson-MIT student prize is a national collegiate invention prize program that celebrates young inventors that have to design, plan, and build prototypes of inventions that are geared towards solving social problems.

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Supported by the Lemelson Foundation, this prize program is a great way to represent those brilliant minds that give hope for the future generations.

“The 2017 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winners show exceptional inventiveness and creativity in solving real world problems,” said Stephanie Couch, executive director of the Lemelson-MIT Program. “Through their outstanding accomplishments and commitment to mentoring younger students, these promising inventors are inspiring a new generation of problem-solvers.”

The Lemelson-MIT program awarded $115,000 in prizes to nine collegiate inventors, which really shows how dedicated they are to recognizing talent that will change the world for the better. The undergrad teams each received $10,000 and each grad student winner received $15,000. Of course, winning isn’t easy. Each of the winners was selected from a highly competitive and diverse applicant pool from colleges and universities across the country. A big shout out to the winners this year for getting selected!

There were four categories of prizes this year: The “Drive it!” Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, which rewards students working on technology-based inventions that can improve transportation; the “Use it!” Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, which rewards students working on technology-based inventions that can improve consumer devices; the “Eat it!” Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, which rewards students working on technology-based inventions that can improve food and agriculture; and the “Cure it!” Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, which rewards students working on technology-based inventions that can improve healthcare.

The undergrad Drive It! team 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. The graduate student in this category led the development of a small, mid-air-deployable, folding electric drone, and adaptable aircraft manufacturing (AAM) architecture.

The undergrad Use It! team is developing a portable, real-time text to Braille converter that they are calling Tactile. The device will allow those who are visually impaired to take a photo of printed text, and the text will be transcribed to Braille on a refreshable display. How awesome is that? The graduate student winner of this same category invented an electrostatic transducer that uses a 125-nanometer thick membrane to produce high-fidelity sound more efficiently. This can be applied to things like hearing aids for better sound quality and longer battery life.

The Eat It! undergrads developed a real-time health analysis to help farmers reduce mortality rates of piglets that are sometimes crushed by the mother pig. The device monitors the temperature in the crate and adjusts it to help keep a healthy environment for the piglets, and can detect when a piglet gets laid on. The device then communicates to a belt on the sow so the piglet can be relieved before any serious damage can occur. The graduate winner in this category 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.

The Cure It! undergrads developed novel protein drugs to kill multi-drug resistant, gram-negative bacteria — or “superbugs.” They found an alternate way to combat this problem that is projected to kill more people than deadly cancer itself by 2050, so the sooner this is implemented, the better. The graduate student in this category developed an innovative approach to deposit microparticles in lymph nodes (LNs) — the tissues that orchestrate immune responses. There was a second grad student winner in this category who invented a process to create high-performance, mass-producible, low-cost prosthetic feet.

If you would like more information as to the specifics of these awesome inventions or more on the genius inventors themselves, click on the press release link. As you can tell from their inventions, they all are really taking a stand on social issues and are making a difference that will help for generations to come.

They are already looking for students to apply to the 2018 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, so check out their website here if you are interested!

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