Students Vie for Lemelson-MIT Caltech Student Prize

Caltech graduate students vying for the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Caltech Student Prize will give public presentations of their inventions on Thursday, January 27, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in the Thomas building, room 206.

There are three finalists this year: Chao Ma, Wendian Shi, and Guoan Zheng. Ma developed a low-cost, quantitative clinical tool for routine immune-function monitoring. Shi invented the "μCyto," a portable lab-on-a-chip system for determining white blood cell counts for point-of-care diagnostics. Zhen designed three devices: a portable on-chip optofluidic microscope; the Lego®-scope, a low-cost microscopy imaging system built with Lego® blocks; and the surface-wave-enabled darkfield aperture, a sensor that can observe weak signals buried among stronger ones (potentially enabling stars to be seen during the daytime). 

The Lemelson-MIT Caltech Student Prize, which seeks to recognize and inspire burgeoning innovators and inventors, is awarded to a Caltech senior or graduate student who has created or improved a product or process, applied a technology in a new way, redesigned a system, or in other ways demonstrated remarkable inventiveness. The winner will be announced on March 9.