Born Global Competition Winners Announced

The Born Global Competition for Innovation in Sustainability, jointly run by the Boston University College of Engineering and the Institute for Sustainable Energy, recently announced the winning BU student project teams.

• First place, a project by Cathy Cheng (ME ’23) and Lekhya Sathi (SAR ’23) titled Redesigning the Urban Environment
  
  
• Second place, the project BeagleNet by Dylan Derose (ME ’22), Pavel Gromov (ME ‘20), Jordan Nichols (CAS ‘22) and Peter Siegel (ME ’22)
  
  
• Third place, the project titled Energy Efficient Architecture by Kaihui Gou (ECE ’20) and Lin Fan (EE ‘20)

Cheng and Sathi, who garnered the top prize of $5,000, embraced the theme of the contest by bringing in biomimicry to their design with their plan to recycle waste water, and produce both food and biomass. They would achieve that goal by developing photobioreactors to produce biomass, and vertical farms to produce food, both of which could be retrofitted onto buildings. These systems would be fed with filtered wastewater, which is already nitrogen rich and can act as a fertilizer. Both systems capture CO2 to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere with little impact and cost, and would produce food as well.

Find out more about the competition and winning projects.

The competition was made possible thanks to a generous gift from the Born Global Foundation headed by Dr. Kimberly Samaha, an alum of BU’s College of Engineering.