Eight students advance to Engineering 2169 Student Pitch Competition

Eight graduate students from Purdue’s College of Engineering emerged as finalists from a field of 21 hopefuls who competed in the first round of the Engineering 2169 Health and Longevity pitch competition held at the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering on April 11.
The Engineering 2169 Health and Longevity Student Pitch Competition will be held on May 3 at 3:00 p.m. at University Tower Hine Hall Auditorium in Indianapolis.

The theme of the competition is a forward-looking view of the students’ research. Participants were prompted to imagine what direction their research might take in the next twenty years and what new related issues and opportunities might affect health and longevity in the near-term future.

The pitches were structured like a Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) pitch. Developed by The University of Queensland, 3MT is a research communication competition designed to enhance academic, presentation, and research communication skills and support the development of students’ capacities to effectively explain their research in language appropriate to an intelligent but nonspecialist audience.

The competition was open to Purdue College of Engineering graduate students. The finalists, schools, and pitch titles are as follows:

  • Soumya Bandyopadhyay, School of Mechanical Engineering: “Hospitals in Homes: The Destiny of Healthcare”
  • Agudemu Borjigin, Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering: “Improving Auditory Research and Clinical Diagnosis using Virtual Reality”
  • Ashlee Colbert, Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering: “No More Infectious Disease, Eradication Please”
  • Freddy Damen, Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering: “Cardiac Imaging: The Future of Understanding the Body’s Engine”
  • Ravinderjit Singh, Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering: “Sensory Processing in Neuropsychiatric Disease Insights from the Auditory System”
  • Shruthi Suresh, Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering: “What IF You Could Predict a Heart Attack”
  • Anastasiia Vasiukhina, Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering: “How will we treat cancer in 20+ years?”
  • Carolina Vivas-Valencia, Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering: “Hi Alexa, can you send a doctor from the cloud?”

The final competition will be held in Hine Hall Auditorium in University Tower on the IUPUI Campus in Indianapolis on Friday, May 3, during the final Engineering 2169 Health and Longevity event, co-hosted by Purdue College of Engineering and Indiana University School of Medicine. The event is part of Purdue’s sesquicentennial celebration, dubbed Giant Leaps, and the yearlong Giant Leaps “What IF?” Ideas Festival, the centerpiece of the University’s 150th campaign. It begins at 1:00 p.m. with a keynote from Jay Hess, Dean of Indiana University School of Medicine, entitled, “What If Medical Technology Transformed Health?” The keynote is followed by a faculty panel discussion. The pitch competition takes place at 3 p.m. and is followed by a poster session and reception in the University Tower Ballroom, during which the top three pitch competition winners will be announced.

The event is free and open to the public.