Rice University undergrads win gold for invention

The Texas Space Grant Consortium (TSGC)  awarded the Top Design Team award and five out of six Best in Category awards to a team of six undergraduates from Rice University at its Design Challenge Showcase on April 14, 2008.

The six students – Stacy Cheng, Kai Chu, Shuvro De, Natalia Vasco, Eva Wang, Shann Yu – competed under the name Team Phoenix against 13 other teams from 7 Texas universities. The Top Design Team award carries a $3,000 team scholarship prize.

Sponsored by NASA and administered by the Texas Space Grant Consortium, the bi-annual engineering design showcase and competition is a unique academic experience that offers undergraduate students an opportunity to propose, design, and fabricate a solution to a topic of importance to NASA and its space exploration missions. 

Through the guidance of faculty advisors, mentors, and laboratory technicians, Rice students in the capstone Bioengineering Senior Design (BIOE 451/452) course work in multidisciplinary teams for one academic year to take a project they have selected from research, design conception, and building to prototyping, testing, and marketing. The students’ participation in design competitions is not a requirement of the course, but many teams have taken on the challenge. And their extra efforts have paid off.

For their senior design project, Team Phoenix built an optical immunoassay device that uses gold nanoshell technology to diagnose the presence of markers in whole blood that indicate disease. Their work builds on technology developed in Professor Jennifer West’s Laboratory for Biofunctional Materials/Cardiovascular Tissue Engineering. The highly sensitive biochemical test provides quick and reliable readings for whole blood samples, and was developed to respond to the need for inexpensive, portable, and sensitive diagnostic tools that prevent the spread of disease in environments where extensive laboratory equipment is unavailable, such as developing countries and in long-term space missions. Their mentors for the project were Dr. Tara Ruttley of the NASA Johnson Space Center Engineering Directorate, Biomedical Systems Branch; Dr. Maria Oden of the Rice University Department of Bioengineering; and Bioengineering graduate student Emily Day.  

“TSGC judges applauded Team Phoenix for their absolutely astounding progress over a year’s time in utilizing an impressive number of scientific and engineering disciplines to accomplish their design goal,” said Debbie Mullins, Program Coordinator of the TSGC Design Challenge. “Their work was both innovative and relevant to both space and Earth application.”

For the past four years, Dr. Oden, lecturer for the capstone BIOE undergraduate design course sequence and coordinator of the design aspects of the Beyond Traditional Borders initiative, has structured Rice University’s bioengineering design program to provide students with hands-on experience while working in an environment that stresses the importance of communication, teamwork, and knowledge of engineering design principles to produce a product that has real-world application.

“For the past three years Rice students have had impressive performances at local, state, and national design competitions. Our students benefit immensely from the incorporation of critical thinking and communication methods into the entire undergraduate curriculum,” added Oden. “We’ve been fortunate to work with Dr. Tracy Volz and the Cain Project to facilitate this integration. The program has been a real differentiator in Rice students’ ability to compete so successfully.”