Cal Poly Students Start Summer With an Extra $5,000 in Their Pockets

SAN LUIS OBISPO – Three Cal Poly students were recently presented $5,000 each for their original ideas by Innovation Quest, a non-profit organization created by Cal Poly alumni Carson Chen and Rich Boberg, and Professor Mike Cirovic, chair of Cal Poly’s Electrical Engineering Department.

IQ was created to identify and encourage the innovative ideas of Cal Poly students and faculty. Through a partnership with the university, IQ recognizes projects with potential commercial value, and helps creators find the resources they need to develop those projects into a marketable product.

For IQ’s first innovation competition, students and faculty were invited to submit their ideas and inventions. The top three submissions were selected by a panel of university and industry leaders. Students Ian Woertz, Jake Olson and Buck Stolberg each won $5,000 for their innovative projects.

Woertz, an Environmental Engineering major from San Diego is designing and building a mobile biodiesel reactor that produces biofuel for Cal Poly farm vehicles using waste vegetable oil from Campus Dining. The prototype differs from other biodiesel processors because it is a modular, self-contained, portable unit, and is more amenable to customization for small users.

Jake Olson, a graduate student in Animal Science from Santa Clara, produced a lycopene-enriched egg. Olson developed a method to incorporate lycopene – the compound that gives tomatoes their red color and has anti-cancer and other health-promoting effects – into the egg yolks of laying hens. Click Here to read more about the lycopene eggs.

Buck Stolberg, an Electrical Engineering major from Fresno developed a new and inexpensive method to separate cells on a microscope slide into a grid by using piezoelectric materials to generate standing force waves in the liquid. According to Stolberg, maintaining an orderly grid of cells on the same plate over a long period of time may be useful in stem cell research.

IQ is sponsoring another innovation contest with similar cash awards. Boberg believes this is only the tip of the iceberg. “Carson and I know that there is a wealth of talent at Cal Poly, and all we need to do is help it rise to the surface in the form of creative ideas that will benefit society.”

For more information about Innovation Quest, visit www.innovationq.org.

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