With GE’s help, UW-Madison competitition winner will un-ring a bell

What: UW–Madison student Chris Nguyen of Waukesha is honored for winning GE’s international competition, “Unimpossible Missions: The University Edition”

When: 8:30-10 a.m. Monday, Sept. 12

Where: Room 1413, Engineering Hall, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison

Chris Nguyen, a University of Wisconsin–Madison biomedical engineering major from Waukesha, has been chosen from nearly 600 students in 35 countries as the grand prize winner in GE’s “Unimpossible Missions: The University Edition” competition.

Students were challenged to make the impossible possible. Using his know-how and GE technology, Nguyen decided to debunk the expression “You can’t un-ring a bell” and submitted his experiment. The fourth-year student figured he could isolate the bell’s ring and eliminate echoes with foam and use GE’s subsea acoustics system to turn the bell’s sound waves back against themselves to effectively cancel out its note.

Nguyen will collect a scholarship of as much as $100,000 and a 10-week paid internship at the GE Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York.

On Monday, he and UW–Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank will welcome GE leaders – including Mike Barber, president and CEO of GE Healthcare Molecular Imaging and Computed Tomography – to campus.

Barber and UW–Madison leaders will engage in a public discussion of the sort of innovation Nguyen brought to bear on his Unimpossible Mission and the ways collaboration with students can help drive innovation and prepare new generations to conduct transformative research that benefits society.

If you would like to cover the event or arrange interviews with the participants, please contact Meredith McGlone, meredith.mcglone@wisc.edu.