Beall and Butterworth Competitions Winners Announced

The first-place team in the Beall Competition was Idene Medical, presenting a wheelchair assist handle that enables wheelchair users a far wider range of mobility than current technologies allow. Photo courtesy of David Ochi.

June 13, 2022 – The eighth Beall and Butterworth Product Design Competitions culminated with an awards ceremony May 25 at The Cove, and a substantial number of Samueli School of Engineering students were named winners. The annual event, sponsored by both the School of Engineering and the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, is divided into two segments. The Beall Student Design Competition in Engineering encourages the creation of new technologies or solutions to current design problems that have the potential for commercialization. The Butterworth Product Development Competition in ICS is designed to encourage the creation of new technologies with potential for commercialization.

The first-place team in the Beall Competition, winning the grand prize of $10,000, was Idene Medical, presenting a wheelchair assist handle that enables wheelchair users a far wider range of mobility than current technologies allow. The team members were all engineering students: Raniel Calilung, Sang Hee Kim, Evelyn Novoa and Sam Rostami. Engineering students also won second- and third-place prizes: Nnaoma Agwu and Daryl Chau won for Vantamask, an electric reusable consumer-grade mask, and Isaac Larroque and Michael Ross won for Thrust Aeronautics, a toroidal aerospike for use in liquid-fueled rockets, respectively.

Engineering students also performed well in the Butterworth Competition, including Sanghyun Byun and Kevin Xu on the second-place winning project, Foodpool, a food delivery app meant for college students.

The competitions, which started in 2014, are open to all UCI students. A requirement is at least one member of each team submitting to the Beall Competition be an engineering student, and at least one member of each team submitting to the Butterworth Competition be an ICS student. Teams are judged by a panel of industry experts, many of whom are UCI alumni.

– Rachel Karas