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.
Advanced All-Carbon Lithium Ion Batteries
As anyone with a smart phone knows, the Holy Grail of battery technology is faster charging and longer lasting. The Advanced All-Carbon Lithium Ion battery technology uses a mix of materials to deliver both. It's a biodegradable "green" chemistry combination, with no toxic metals, for abundant electricity on the go.
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Rahul Mukherjee
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Eklavya Singh
AgroSpheres
Farmers need pesticides to protect growing crops. But at harvest time, pesticides are a problem. Regulations impose strict waiting periods between pesticide application and harvest, up to 66 days. AgroSpheres are engineered biological particles that degrade residual pesticides on the surface of plants, allowing crops to be safely harvested after just a few hours. This helps farmers avoid crop loss due to unforeseen weather events and at the same time saves the environment from additional pesticides.
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Payam Pourtaheri
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Ameer Shakeel
AgZen-Cloak
Agricultural pesticide pollution is responsible for about 200,000 deaths and 385 million acute illnesses annually. Only 2% of sprayed pesticide reaches targeted plant surfaces because these surfaces are water repellant, so pesticides are regularly oversprayed. AgZen-Cloak technology cloaks droplets of pesticide-laden water with an ultra-thin layer of biodegradable, food-safe, plant-derived oil to increase retention on plants. This invention could help farmers use approximately 80% less spray and ensure better crop protection, yield and revenue while reducing pollution.
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Vishnu Jayaprakash
Amtek Phase-Change Incubator for Use in Areas Without Electricity
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Amy B. Smith
Anti-Adherent Compounds for Contact Lenses
Around 70 million people around the world wear contact lenses, and up to 20 percent of them could end up contracting a lens-inducted infection. Fan Yang's goal was to prevent infection-causing bacteria from adhering to contact lenses by coating the lenses with safe chemicals.
When Yang was ten years old, she moved from Peking, China to Davis, California with her mother, Yan-Lei Liu, a laboratory technician at Davis Medical School. Remembering her childhood years in China, Yang said, "I always like to solve problems. When I was five years old, we didn't have air conditioning at home. So, I would open the refrigerator in the summer and sit in front of it to read my books. My grandmother finally hid and watched me, because she wanted to know why the electric bill was so high." As a sixth-grade student in the United States, Yang became interested in microbiology after a school science project that prompted her to examine bacteria levels before and after hand washing in order to find the reason why her mother always asked her to wash her hands before eating.
When Yang was in the 8th grade, she interned in a lab and worked on a project that looked for compounds capable of adhering to bacteria. A few years later, while visiting her optometrist, she was warned away from contacts because of the risk of infection. Once she arrived at Johns Hopkins University, she put these pieces of her past together and began to work on her anti-adherent project using nano-techniques.
When asked where her ideas come from, Yang said, "Sometimes I feel like they just pop up. Sometimes I’m able to write them down. Then, I have to sort them out, read literature about them, and research." Yang also noted the excitement of finding solutions. "It means I have finally done something that no one has ever done before." After each new discovery, Yang would find herself at work on another problem, facing obstacles again.
At the time of her participation in the Collegiate Inventors Competition, Yang was a sophomore studying biomaterial and nanomaterial engineering, with plans to attend dental school and eventually study for her Ph.D.
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