Student Teams Win Over $45K in Recent Competitions

This last month, students and teams from the Entrepreneurism and Leadership Programs competed in several citywide, statewide and nationwide business competitions, and collectively, two student teams and two graduate students took home over $45000 in cash prizes. UC San Diego student teams ByStanders to Upstanders and Open Viral Load (previously named VivaScope) each won $10,000 of award funding for their projects from the San Diego Social Innovation Challenge. Graduate student Alex Phan won $2,500 for placing in first at the UC San Diego Grad Slam and $1,000 for placing in third at the first UC-wide Grad Slam competition. And, graduate student Aliaksandr Zaretski took home $25,000 cash and $20,000 in equity for receiving first place at Chapman University’s California Dreamin’ nationwide entrepreneurial contest.

The San Diego Social Innovation Challenge is an annual competition hosted by the University of San Diego and their Center for Peace and Commerce. The competition aims to promote, guide and support student-driven ideas to launch or contribute to social enterprises, and has several rounds of idea labs and perfecting project pitches and business models. The Social Innovation Challenge had over 100 project submissions from San Diego university students and three rounds of challenges and project eliminations. For the final award ceremony, the remaining eight USD teams and eight San Diego-wide teams gave 90-second pitches in front of a live panel of judges. Of those eight San Diego-wide teams, four teams came from UC San Diego.

After making the final pitch competition, Global TIES team Open Viral Load partnered with Engineering World Health, another UCSD finalist team of the Social Innovation Challenge, deciding that it would be beneficial to move forward in the competition together. The teams presented one pitch on their collaborative social venture and received $10,000 to fund their projects that focus on expanding the access of HIV testing. mystartupXX team Bystanders to Upstanders (B2U) also took home $10,000 for their application to encourage and gamify volunteer work.

Alex Phan, MAE Ph.D. Candidate
Photo by Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego Publications
Read UC San Diego News Center Release here

Graduate student Alex Phan took first place at the UC San Diego-wide Grad SLAM 2015 and third place UC-wide Grad Slam competition. Both competitions challenge graduate students to present a “TED-like talk” that can explain their graduate research to a general audience and award cash prizes. As the first prize winner at the UC San Diego Grad SLAM 2015 competition held last month on April 14, Phan was chosen to represent UC San Diego at the UC-wide competition in Oakland. Phan went against 9 other graduate students from the other UC schools and took home third place for his presentation on how an intraocular pressure sensor can better detect and understand glaucoma, an eye disease that affects over 60 million people worldwide.

After completing his undergraduate degree in Bioengineering at UC San Diego, Phan is now currently pursuing his Ph.D in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Phan has also completed the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center’s NSF I-Corps Program in October 2014, where he was able to combine his background in engineering with his interests in entrepreneurship. Earlier this year, Phan took home first prize at Entrepreneur Challenge’s Elevator Pitch Competition.

Nanoengineering graduate student Aliaksandr (Alex) Zaretski represented UC San Diego at the 2015 California Dreamin’ Entrepreneurship Conference and Competition and took home $25,000 in cash, $20,000 in equity and first prize in the overall competition. The annual competition, hosted by Chapman University, draws students from the best business and entrepreneurship programs from the United States and the United Kingdom.

In 2013, Zaretski took home first prizes at the Entrepreneur Challenge at UCSD’s Elevator Pitch Competition and their $100K Business Competition with his company, GrollTex. GrollTex has an innovative technology for the synthesis of large-area graphene and has been an impressive startup success. Zarestski was awarded the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center’s Department of Energy Fellowship and the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship last spring, and GrollTex recently accepted investment from the Triton Technology Fund and is in talks for a large-scale investment from another venture capital firm.

Our students show us time and again that passion and hard work don’t go unnoticed. Congratulations again to these students for their continued achievements!

6 Entrepreneurism & Leadership Programs Teams Advanced to USD Social Innovation Challenge Semi-Finals

Last month, 17 UC San Diego teams advanced to the semi-finals of the Social Innovation Challenge hosted by the University of San Diego Center for Peace and Commerce. We are proud to announce that six out of those 17 teams hail from the Jacobs School of Engineering’s Entrepreneurism and Leadership programs. Bystanders to Upstanders, CaroSoul, Fiji Kindergarten Project, One Village Philippines, VivaScope and Wastelights await the announcement of the teams to compete in the final round at the end of this week.

The Social Innovation Challenge aims to promote, guide and support student-driven ideas to launch or contribute to social enterprises, leveraging the university’s Center for Peace and Commerce as the initiative’s catalyst and mentor. The first USD Social Innovation Challenge was held in 2011 and had 16 submitted projects. This year, the SIC received project submissions from 100 student teams, and since their first challenge in 2011, the SIC has awarded over $150,000 in cash prizes to student projects that present novel, sustainable and effective solutions for social problems. The teams that make it to the third, final round will pitch their ideas in front of a live panel of experts.

Bystanders to Upstanders developed an application that aims to effectively engage people in communities and promote volunteer work through the power of social media and game design. In their Social Innovation project, the team wrote: “the ultimate goal is to lead our users toward a more socially conscious lifestyle.” Their application hopes to localize, personalize and gamify community service, allowing “local volunteer event planners who do not have the means necessary to raise awareness for their cause [by making] events with [their] platform and reach[ing] out to a larger community than they would be able to access by themselves.” Bystanders to Upstanders is a team at Mystartupxx, a UC San Diego accelerator supported by the von Liebig Entpreneurism Center and Rady School of Management to promote female entrepreneurship.

Another Mystartupxx team, CaroSoul is a sustainable wetsuit company with a focus on decreasing landfill neoprene wetsuit waste and creating quality women’s wetsuits. Founder and CEO Caroline McCandless is a Masters student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation and has been surfing since she was seven years old. Her inspiration and drive for the project is drawn from her experience and love for the natural world, as a surfer and San Diego environmentalist. McCandless explained that “Neoprene is petroleum based synthetic material that is difficult to breakdown… when it goes into landfills, it says in landfills.” CaroSoul has established a wetsuit recycling campaign with six drop-off locations in San Diego and hopes to expand its operations.

Global TIES: Fiji Kindergarten Project works to create a kindergarten center in Taveuni, Fiji out of recycled shipping containers. Project lead Cathy Yu compares the costs a sustainable center versus a traditional one, explaining that “through the use of sustainable engineering, we are able to create a kindergarten center with a composting toilet, potable sink and rainwater harvesting catchment for less than $10,000, while a normal brick and mortar kindergarten center would cost an upwards of $25,000 electricity.” Yu reflected on how the Global Teams in Engineering Service program brought their team members together, stating that without the program, the group would not have been able to connect with their client in Fiji and mobilize students from all over the university to put their education to use through a tangible project.

One Village Philippines’s project is their solar powered street lamp, a vehicle for ending poverty in Philippine communities. The team has designed the street lamp to be affordable, sustainable and reproducible for the low-income communities in the Philippines that they serve. Project lead Minh Dao told us that the team work aims to provide an environmentally-friendly and affordable lighting system to low-income communities and foster entrepreneurship within the Philippines. One Village Philippines has had on-going projects with the Global TIES program for four years now, and Dao said "we were motivated to compete in the USD Social Innovation Challenge and other social innovation competitions alike by our TIES faculty advisor, Dr. Mandy Bratton and Undergraduate Advisor, Caitlyn Smith."

VivaScope is working towards expanding the availability of viral load testing in the developing world by providing a novel system that will dramatically reduce costs for tests. VivaScope’s project tackles the costs that prevent millions of people from receiving the care that they need. Project lead Kirk Hutchison explained that VivaScope reduces costs significantly from $10,000 per machine and $20 per test to $1000 per device and $5 per test. VivaScope is a partnership between Global TIES and Engineering World Health, a UC San Diego student organization. “We are all working on this project because we truly believe in the importance of our goals and our ability to make a positive difference in the world through the application of our engineering skills,” said Hutchison.

The Wastelights team aims to eliminate waste by converting it into a source of energy—making sewage into electricity and kitchen waste into biofuel and biochar. Wastelights, led by Joyce Sunday, hopes to create three different types of systems: small, medium and large for portable, home and power grid units. The team has already created a basic prototype and is supported by the Moxie Center for Student Entrepreneurship and the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center. Wastelights has also completed the NSF I-Corps Program.

Congratulations to our teams on their accomplishments! We are so proud of their social innovation projects and we wish them luck in advancing to the finals!