Over 70 people attended the Welcome Event on May, 17th 2012. The evening began with an introduction of Engineering World Health by the current president of EWH at UCI, Arlene Doria. Then, the chair of Biomedical Engineering, Dr. Abraham Lee, gave an inspiring talk on his thoughts on how engineers can contribute to the advancement of global health. Dinner from the PizzaBakery was served followed by a raffle of external hard drives from Western Digital to 5 lucky winners. Thank you to Western Digital for their continued support of STEM education.
The final highlight of the evening culminated in the revelation of the top 5 proposals of the Biomedical Engineering Student Team (BEST) competition of which 16 teams with over 60 students were initially registered in. The submitted proposals were scored against 4 categories: a) Diagnostic Function (technical merit), b) Low Cost, c) Ease of Use/Developing World Deployment & d) Business Implementation. The top 5 winners were:
1st place champion ($2000) – MedDetect Design
- Vlad Satchouk
- Patrick Kahn
- Nigel Fernandez
- Natasha Felsinger
- Huylong Ngo
2nd place finalist ($1000) – Engineered Immediate Response (EIR) Diagnostics
- Jahangir Karimi
- Timothy Vu
- John Louie
3rd place finalist ($500) – The Davaman Diagnostics -REME-D
- Chase Davis
- Reaz Rahman
4th place – Diagnosis of Neonatal Sepsis
- Ryan Farraro
- John Guzman
- Mark Francisco
5th place – Biomedical Civil Business
- Hung-Chun (Jason) Chen
- Daniel Chien
- Edward Lin
We extend a warm thank you to the Orange County section of IEEE-Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (Dr. William Tang, Chair of OC EMBS, & Dr. John Collins, Chair of OC IEEE) for sponsoring the design competition. Also thank you to the competition judges including Dr. Oladele Ogunseitan (Chair of Public Health), Dr. G.P. Li (Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of Calit2 and INRF), Dr. Tang, and Dr. Collins. Congratulations to all the winners and all teams in recognition of their efforts to improve global health!
Testimonials from the judges about the competition and the award winners:
- “The clear top 5 winners – they are very, very good,” Dr. Tang.
- “This is an excellent program. I am delighted that all the reviewers agree more or less on the exceptionally strong entries,” Dr. Ogunseitan.
- “Yes, I agree with Dele that the entries are exceptional,” Dr. Collins.
