FAU Wave Competition Celebrates Innovative Student Research
From left to right: Stephen Hoover, Devin Willis, Evita Conway and Vithulan Suthakaran
Ď㽶´«Ă˝ has announced the winners of the annual Wave Competition, an undergraduate research competition organized by FAU Tech Runway and the . Students have been working on innovative projects for the past two semesters, taking their ideas from concept to reality.
Devin Willis, a freshman at FAU High School, and Evita Conway, a senior at FAU studying neuroscience and behavior, tied for first place. Willis’ project, called SLIDEMAP, is a way to improve the accuracy of tumor cell classification and cancer diagnosis. He was previously named a in the 2017 Discovery 3M Young Scientist Challenge. Conway developed an eye tracking technology that can detect anxiety and mood disorders. The winners each took home a $1500 prize.
This year’s second place winner, Vithulan Suthakaran, developed an artificial leaf that transforms carbon dioxide into oxygen through photosynthesis. Suthakaran, a junior at FAU High, said the Wave competition introduced him to valuable resources.
“This program helped me gain connections in the research world that I would not have otherwise had access to,” he said. “I also learned how to file a patent, and am hoping to patent my project.”
Suthakaran recently won first place in the environmental engineering category at the Ď㽶´«Ă˝ State Science and Engineering Fair with his project. He also won first place at with a different project, a robot he created to help clean up oil spills.
Other projects during the 2018 Wave Competition included a weight-sensing electric skateboard with assisted navigation; machine olfaction using artificial neural networks; a synthetic biology and bioinformatics system used for counterfeit drug detection; and a drone that can autonomously 3D map uncharted regions.
For more information about the FAU Wave Competition, click .
-FAU-
Tags: students | technology | science | research