Past Collegiate Inventors Competition Winners
Learn about the student inventors who have excelled in the Collegiate Inventors Competition®. You can search our past competition winners by name, year or university.
Hi-C: Method for Genome Sequencing in Three Dimensions
Plastic balls, plaid, Ramen noodles, and Romeo and Juliet. Erez Lieberman-Aiden sees the genome very differently than the rest of the world.
He gained this view while working on an immunology-based project. He started wondering if the genome folding that creates antibodies might be occurring elsewhere, and if these interactions might affect gene expression.
"There are some big gaps in our understanding," said Lieberman-Aiden, currently a research fellow at Harvard University. "Between the scale of about 100 bases and about 100 million bases we have a very limited knowledge of how it is the genome is folded."
The genome is essentially a polymer - a long string of repeated bases. At the base pair level two strings of bases wind into a double helix, which folds around structural proteins. We also know how chromosomes, huge chunks of hundreds of millions of base pairs that make up our genome, are arranged, but the levels between are a scientific grey area.
Figuring out genomic interactions across these distances could explain how the genome can create such a wide variety of cells in our body. "It has something to do with the regulation of this information - how it is accessed - what is turned on, what is turned off." said Lieberman-Aiden. "Our work has actually shown that that [regulation] is intimately related to how the genome is folded."
To understand this folding, Lieberman-Aiden and his teammate, Nynke van Berkum, approached the genome as if it were the text of Romeo and Juliet written out one letter at a time on a huge noodle. If you swirl that noodle in a bowl, like chromosomes in a nucleus, many different sections come into close contact.
To identify these touching sections, they froze the strand (be it noodle or genome) where it was, shattered it, glued it back together and then "read" all of the pieces, looking for the out-of-order sections. For example you might see a strand where "Two households, both alike in dignity" connected with "and Juliet is the sun!" instead of, "In fair Verona, where we lay our scene." This would mean those two sections were interacting across long stretches, because they were out of place when reconnected.
When the researchers analyzed which sequences within a chromosome were interacting, they could see they formed plaid-like patterns of compartments. The red compartments had more interactions and more activity, while the blue compartments had fewer interactions and few markers of activity.
This interaction data showed something interesting; at the million-base level the data didn"t fit accepted polymer folding models. The traditional theory, a tangled mess called the equilibrium globule, just wasn"t possible. The team found that a structure called the fractal globule, which had never been observed before, fit their data better. It's just as dense as the equilibrium globule, but unknotted for easy access.
Future work includes studying even smaller regions of interaction within the genome. They are also hoping to study different cells during differentiation to see how the genome changes conformation.
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Erez Lieberman-Aiden
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Nynke L. Van Berkum
Hi-Impact Shoulder Stabilization Brace
The Hi-Impact Shoulder Stabilization Brace is a self-applicable, low-profile brace designed for athletes who have experienced an anterior shoulder dislocation. The brace provides compressive support to the glenohumeral joint during activity to aid in prevention of secondary dislocations while still allowing athletes to perform at a high level."
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Riley Csernica
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Meredith Donaldson
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Chelsea Ex-Lubeskie
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Kaitlin Grove
High Performance Polymer Microlenses
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Daniel M. Hartmann
Highlight: Powdered Additive for Disinfectants
It is standard healthcare practice to use bleach sprays for disinfecting surfaces. However, bleach sprays have several flaws that allow for transmission of disease. Highlight is a powdered additive that is mixed into disinfectants at point-of-use and improves the process of decontamination by visualizing coverage of sprayed surfaces, preventing beading and dripping, and slowing evaporation. All are critical factors for maximizing the effectiveness of disinfectants, making for a safer environment.
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Katherine Jin
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Jason Kang
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Kevin Tyan
Household Electrocoagulation Arsenic Filter
As part of a capstone design course for Dartmouth's engineering program, Phil Wagner, Lindsay Holiday, and Dana Leland tackled a problem: to reduce arsenic found in groundwater to safe levels, with a cheap, reliable device made of materials locally available in rural Nepal.
Arsenic naturally leaches out of the rock underlying much of Nepal, so the groundwater there typically contains up to 200 parts per billion (ppb) of arsenic. The World Health Organization (WHO) standards for drinking water call for no more than 10 ppb arsenic, and WHO considers arsenic in drinking water an "urgent problem" in Nepal and neighboring areas.
The team developed a way of using electrocoagulation - a process employed in the large-scale water treatment plants of many modern cities - in a system radically downsized to fit into three five-gallon buckets. Water to be treated goes into the first bucket where the students induce electrocoagulation by sending a simple electric current through two steel plates in the water. Iron precipitates are released. These iron particles bond aggressively with the arsenic that exists in the water. This newly-reacted water is then poured into a second bucket of clean sand, which has a hole in the bottom and sits over a third empty bucket. The sand collects the iron-arsenic particles and arsenic-free water collects in the bottom bucket. When the team tested the device with water contaminated with 200 ppb arsenic, the output water contained under 1ppb arsenic - well under the 10 ppb level considered safe for drinking.
Wagner, 22, who grew up in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania and graduated in Spring 2009 with his engineering degree, is currently spending a year teaching high school in the Marshall Islands. Upon his return to the U.S., Wagner plans to continue graduate studies in engineering. As he says, "Engineering balances both a science aspect and a human aspect, which makes it endlessly interesting."
Holiday, 24, spent time growing up in both Teec Nos Pos, Arizona in the Navajo Nation and Phoenix. As a recent environmental engineering graduate, she looks forward to her immediate work with the Energy Efficiency Division of Southern California Edison. Looking forward several years into the future, Holiday says, "I would like to own a business on the Navajo Nation and encourage building sustainable communities."
Also a recent environmental engineering graduate and a Baltimore native, Leland, 22, is now a project manager at Eaton Corporation in Wisconsin, participating in a fast-track leadership program. Leland found work on the capstone engineering project very rewarding, commenting, "I hope our work can help bring clean drinking water to people in need in third world nations such as Nepal, Bangladesh, and Cambodia."
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Lindsay Holiday
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Dana Leland
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