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.
SHELS: Synthetic Hollow Enzyme Loaded Shells
Synthetic Hollow Enzyme Loaded Shells offer a versatile therapeutic strategy based on hiding and protecting otherwise immunogenic non-human enzymes from the immune system and their delivery to the target. This simple yet effective approach can potentially be applied to the majority of cancers including blood cancers, solid tumors, and metastatic lesions with application-specific modifications.
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Inanc Ortac
SolarClear
Dust storms, especially in the Western United States, Middle East and North Africa, are a significant problem for large-scale solar power plants. While solutions exist to clean them off, they are impractical and expensive. Cleaning a typical utility-scale solar installation requires a staggering 600,000 to 1 million gallons of potable water. SolarClear addresses this problem by using autonomous waterless cleaning technology that is both significantly more effective and efficient compared to existing technologies. Additionally, the unique design of the electrodes that are used in the system makes SolarClear economically viable for utility-scale installation in the desert.
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Shrish Patel
Spectrom: Low-Cost, High-Precision, On-Demand Full Color 3D Printing
Industrial 3D printing is about to get a lot more colorful. Spectrom is the first device that enables Fused Deposition Modeling, or additive 3D printers, to print in full, variable color. The technology leverages the precise application and rapid changing of proprietary dyes to create crisp, multi-colored objects.
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Taylor Fahey
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Charles Haider
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Cedric Kovacs-Johnson
Spherical Vehicle with Flywheel Momentum Storage for High Torque Capabilities
As a senior thesis project at MIT, Schroll explored a fascination he has had for some time with spherical vehicles. After a broad investigation into prior research on the subject, he found that previous design concepts have significant limits in their ability to overcome obstacles or inclines, and decided he would try to address these limitations. Through months of brainstorming, he conceived of a novel solution that uses gyroscopes to store and dispense angular momentum to aid in climbing hills, obstacles, and stairs.
Schroll came up with the idea partly by playing with a toy gyroscope. "I saw how gyroscopes can behave in ways that seem to defy gravity as a result of the principle of gyroscopic precession. I applied this principle to a spherical robot to allow it to also appear to defy gravity," he said.
Schroll believes that a spherical vehicle has many advantages over an ordinary ground vehicle because of its round shape. It cannot be turned upside down since every orientation is right side up, and it has no exposed points of weakness. All components are protected inside a spherical shell that could be armored and possibly sealed to give it amphibious abilities. Despite these advantages, limits in the performance of previous designs have prevented spherical vehicles from being useful for most applications, but Schroll hopes this invention will change that. He imagines his spherical robot having many potential uses including surveillance, reconnaissance, and disaster zone assessment especially in situations where conditions on the ground may not yet be safe for people. He envisions being able to air drop a fleet of sphere robots into a location and have them work together yet autonomously to gather information. He says his robot would also be appropriate for planetary exploration, as well as search and rescue since its ability to climb stairs would allow access to urban environments. Schroll says that the internal flywheel mechanism could also be useful in applications such as active stability and safety in off-road vehicles.
Presently a graduate student at Colorado State University, Schroll is furthering his research on his spherical robot and the gyroscope mechanism inside. Now 22, Schroll grew up in Chatham, New Jersey, and graduated in 2004 from Chatham High School. His family currently resides in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. Schroll graduated with his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in May of 2008, and he expects to graduate with his master's in Mechanical Engineering from CSU in 2010. Schroll plans to obtain a Ph.D., and hopes to continue doing advanced research in either an academic or industrial environment. Ultimately, however, he would like to work as an independent inventor and start his own think-tank company. As he says, "I have a running list of inventions-to-be," and he looks forward to having the opportunity to pursue them.
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Greg Schroll
Spherical, Singularity-Free Robotic Wrist
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