2017 Teams
Team Chimeric Designs
Alexander Brown, Kevin Gray, Ashfin Khan
Chimeric Designs’s technology overcomes a major weakness of Antibody-Drug Conjugates by utilizing antibody fusion proteins that super-functionalize a drug. Our approach increases the effectiveness of ADCs several times and we hope to be a partner with the pharmaceutical industry to create improved drugs that selectively target cancer cells.
Team BIMBY
Ray Donelick, Margaret Donelick
Team BIMBY is designing compressed air energy storage vessels for active and abandoned mines by using which utilizes waste rock materials Our innovations will help meet critical needs of the renewable energy sector (energy storage), the environmental sector (cleaning up mine sites) and mining communities (providing long term jobs, even after the traditional mining operation is complete).
Team Semplice
Derek, Jiwan, Charles Diako, Nik Nikolov, Alexander Meldrum, Andrew Jaboro, and Henry Baker
Do you remember eating citrus “dream bars” in hot summer days? Orange, lime or raspberry sherbet blended with vanilla ice cream. What if you could find that same heavenly taste again, but this time in a drink full of electrolytes, low in sugar, and made from Greek yogurt? Greek yogurt is the fastest growing dairy product line in America. The benefits of yogurt consumption are well-documented, but Greek yogurt production results in a large amount of acidic whey; the yogurt industry has no economical solution to utilize this byproduct, but WSU Food Science students have a plan: a new consumer beverage that will remind you of childhood summers while providing as much potassium as a banana, a boost of protein, and low calories. Team Semplice has proprietary recipes validated by consumer taste panels (including many focused on international palettes) and is ready to partner locally, nationally, and internationally to bring their product to market.
Team Home Pharmacist
Cheyenne Newsome, Melanie Shelden, Mike Ebinger
Home Pharmacist seeks to revolutionize the pharmacy experience, and make quality pharmacy care available to place-bound and rural patients. By visiting patients in their homes and making medication recommendations to their doctors and nurses, Home Pharmacists can provide private and holistic care to patients regardless of their ability to travel to a pharmacy or doctor’s office.
Team iWatch-uShape
Cheyenne Newsome, Melanie Shelden, and Mike Ebinger
iWatch-uShape is an innovative personal wellness coach that watches you to shape as you wish. It leverages state-of-art machine learning and wearable computing techniques to learn your dietary habits, rest and exercise schedule, and intelligently designs a customized diet and fitness plan to assist you to reach your personal goal. Furthermore, iWatch-uShape provides you with a community-based experience enabling you to share your progress with your support group and keep your momentum.
Team POC Diagnostic
Shuangyi Bai and Yang Song
POC Diagnostic is developing point-of-care devices for field monitoring and diagnosis. We aim to provide portable and low cost systems able to rapidly detect a wide variety of disease biomarkers, heavy metals and pathogens, without requiring expensive lab equipment or highly-trained technicians
Team Nanoptics/Powersyl
William Schlecht and Wen-Ji Dong
Nanoptics is developing solar capture based on the unique phenomenon of nanoparticle-induced photon scattering. The technology provides higher efficiencies for existing solar cells. Our device can be transparent or semi-transparent with different facial colors. Therefore, the our material can be used in novel building materials such as window glass and sidings of residential homes or office buildings to convert both direct and diffuse sunlight into electricity.
Team MathFire
Charlene Fluster and Matt Fluster
Team MathFire has created an interactive math education product designed to help students at the transition point between counting and basic arithmetic. Our product is designed specifically to combat “math anxiety,” and to help parents and children work toward math competence AND confidence in a fun, immersive game environment.
Team NG Elisa
William Schlecht, Shuang Guo, and Wen-Ji Dong
NG ELISA’s kit works with all different platforms of the traditional ELISA assays and can reduce ELISA assay time from hours to 20 minutes without compromising its sensitivity and specificity. ELISA is the current dominant approach to immunoassay for protein identification. The production cost of our kit is comparable to the cost of a traditional ELISA; therefore, the NG ELISA technology will save significant time with minimal or no increase in cost to the user.
Team Kade & Vos
Deborah Christel and Ashley Morse
For You by Cougs seeks to provide a brand and retail platform for students and faculty to design, manufacture and sell their inventions. Many faculty researchers create products and technology that is hoped to be purchased or licensed to another company. For You by Cougs will provide an alternative route for disseminating our products by offering the retail outlet directly to inventors. For You by Cougs has four products, one patent pending, that have been validated by research, medical wear test trials and consumer focus groups and are ready to brand, manufacturer and partner locally, nationally and internationally to bring research driven products to the market.
Team NatureClaim
Tung Nguyen, Korey Brownstein, and Hien Nguyen
The dietary supplement industry is growing rapidly with little to no regulatory oversight. Due to the lack of safety regulations and needed information, consumers are oftentimes left in the dark and do not receive viable information on a particular supplement. In many cases, the product does not have any research to back its claims. Consumers need access to unbiased information on product safety and effectiveness. Team NatureClaim provides the public with this unbiased information. NatureClaim reviews research articles and analytical data; offers information on the quality, safety, and effectiveness of supplements; and summarizes all of the information utilizing an easy-to-read format
Team Microtec
Abid Tanzil, Iva Tews, and Anamaria Pires
Clean water and reduction of waste water discharge are key needs of processing facilities, both to reduce their costs and environmental footprint. Many “green technologies,” such as utilization of biomass materials for renewable energy and chemical production, are highly water intensive – much of this water is contaminated with organic waste compounds that cannot be treated with traditional municipal water systems. Our scalable reactors can be tailored to a specific waste treatment profile, enabling our customers to treat their own water on site for reuse, ultimately saving money, water, and strain on infrastructure.
Team Cognition Kit
Rani Muthukrishnan, Matt Fluster, and Suresh Iyer
Cognition Kit produces curriculum tools designed to encourage higher-level systems thinking in elementary school students. Using a combination of active learning techniques, the course materials allow students to develop an understanding of complex systems by layering simple-to-understand descriptions of system components until the student is able to understand the system as a whole. This technique is applicable across many subjects and is being first applied to forestry ecology and biosystems.
Team TissuCellO
Girdhari Rijal, Weimin Li, Christopher Coppin, and Bassem Bejjani
TissueCellO produces bio-mimicking structural scaffolding for bioscience research, specifically cell culture and pharmaceutical drug testing. TissueCellO’s scaffolds create a microenvironment specially tuned for cells and tissues of interest, which helps researchers produce consistent results by removing the many variability problems that exist with current state of the art scaffolding materials.
Team Inbound Hiro
Adam Jones, Tracy Le, and Euntaek Leem
Inbound Hiro is the customer relationship manager all small businesses need. Our software provides insight into your customer’s interaction with your website, social media, and direct mailing to help you make smarter decisions about what to sell, to whom and when to target that direct and personalized message to achieve a higher rate of sales conversion with minimal effort and no technical expertise. Inbound Hiro is the perfect “marketing hire” without having to retain a marketer on staff or spend precious hours of your day trying to be your own marketing expert.
Team Dual Ionophore
Jessica Mahinthakumar, Bernie VanWie, Olivia Ranft, Mentor: Kris Aalto [not pictured]
Team Dual Ionophore is reinventing rapid-response testing for low-abundance biological markers. Using a simple design which can fit into a handheld device, the Team is able to test for biomarkers in whole blood samples with minimal lab processing and rapid results. Their patent-pending system is unique in its design for ease of use, low-cost, and high accuracy – a combination of features that we believe will make our device the go-to system for medical professionals in the hospital AND in the field who need rapid results to make informed patient care decisions.
Team GreenFilters
Katie Zhong and Hamid Souzandeh
The GreenFilters product utilizes natural materials (agriculture and forestry origin) to create green air filtering materials which exceed the capabilities of traditional petroleum-based filters, including the ability to remove both solid (dust and particles) and gaseous (toxic chemicals and biologic agents) simultaneously.
Team SOC Energy Materials
SOC Energy Materials is building the batteries of the future. Through a tailored carbon-silicon anode, the Team is able to achieve capacities and charging speeds unheard-of in modern batteries.
Team BioElectrons
BioElectrons is producing a new type of electronic bandage that may eliminate the need for antibiotics for many wounds, and will provide improved emergency first aid for US warfighters wounded in the field.