Engineering awards announced

Chung Hoon Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in electrical and computer engineering, and master of business administration student Garima Goel took the first-place $10,000 prize in the G. Steven Burrill Technology Business Plan Competition. The team’s proposed business is called LifeSonics. Its business strategy is based on developing an electronically actuated and controlled pulmonary drug delivery system to solve problems of drug delivery devices associated with the contemporary asthma market utilizing compressed-gas based Metered-Dose-Inhalers. The company will also develop micro- and nano-scale drug delivery devices to deliver proteins for diabetes treatment. The Burrill competition is sponsored by the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the College of Engineering and the School of Business.

John Becker, mechanical engineering student, won the 2001 Steuber Prize for Excellence in Writing. His story is a fictional account of a woman’s resilient response to the Japanese ritual “Nyotaimori,” from which the story gets its name. Becker won $5,000. Judges awarded second place and $2,000 to Kelly McNamer for her technical report entitled “Synthetic Spider Silk.” McNamer details research efforts aimed at producing synthetic materials with the properties of spider silk.

Two students earned $500 honorable mention awards: William Edmonds for “Women and the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” and Daniel Gianola for “Surface Modification of Nickel Titanium for Biomedical Applications.” The prize is sponsored by William Steuber, a UW–Madison alumnus. The contest is now in its 10th year. To read the winning papers, visit: http://tc.engr.wisc.edu/steuber.