As all Honors College members have before them, first-year students demonstrated our mission this spring by creating more than 50 extraordinary social innovation projects intended to improve the lives of others, while they also learned to work together to define, shape, and articulate their ideas. Their peers selected just 12 project teams to present at the Forum plenary on a single night before a panel of judges from business and academia.
Winning Projects
First Place: CoCorazón
A multilevel business model to provide clean drinking water to people in Puerto Rico through the manufacturing of reusable water bottles with built-in carbon filters made from renewable local materials and the repurposing of landfill waste.
Project created by (L-R): Dymytriy Zyunkin, Amanda Lescano, Susan Wu, Cindy Song.
Professor: Tatiana Popovitchenko
Second Place: AquaSol
An inexpensive point-of-use water filter that employs coffee waste and sodium alginate beads to remove lead from running water, created with communities in mind where lead-contaminated water is prevalent.
Project created by (L-R): Chelsea Wong, Gregory Giovannini, Rushabh Mehta.
Professor (L): Sarah Zou
Third Place: Project R—Rehabilitation, Recovery, Results
A multifaceted opioid rehabilitation clinic that offers unique therapy methods such as floriculture and beekeeping in addition to traditional employment and education programs, while also allowing patients to help the community limit the occurrence of opioid related issues.
Project created by (L-R): Eric Shapiro, Janaina Armand, Stephanie Ji, Mitchell Wong.
Professor: Harita Menon