Students win second place at Global Grand Challenge

A team of USC students was awarded second place on Wednesday for their entry in the Global Grand Challenges Summit Student Day Competition in Beijing on Sept. 13. Iovine and Young Academy sophomore Matthew Stern and 2015 Viterbi alumni Clayton Brand, Michael Maylahn and Dinesh Seemakurty came second to China for their startup, Stasis Labs.

“Stasis Labs offers a connected vitals-monitoring system to equalize the amount of patient information available to doctors around the world,” Maylahn said. “Our vital signs monitoring solution combines custom hardware, a tablet-based patient chart and a web-based patient portal.”

Maylahn said this startup will allow for a more accurate picture of a patient’s health, which will make it easier for caregivers to assess possible problems and, if necessary, intervene earlier. The team plans to integrate the system into the Indian healthcare market this fall and, following that, Maylahn said, aims to create global access by using technology to decrease costs and increase availability of medical care.

Each team at the Student Day Competition was expected to pitch an idea for a startup that addressed one of four topics: sustainability, security, health or joy of living. A panel of scientists, entrepreneurs and engineers judged the entries.

In addition to winning silver in the competition, USC’s team was the top team solving a medical issue.

Along with USC’s group, U.S. teams included participants from Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the New York Institute of Technology, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Olin College. Student groups from the United Kingdom and China also competed.

“The competition was very inspiring,” Maylahn said. “[It was] wonderful to see so many different engineers of our generation working to solve global issues.”

GGCS is supported by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the Royal Academy of Engineering. According to the NAE, the competition aims to create a generation of problem-solvers and world-changers.

In addition to the Student Day, a larger conference took place on Sept. 15 and 16, in which 600 experts and speakers addressed topics related to the outlined categories.

Speakers included Alibaba Group founder and Executive Chairman Jack Ma, cybersecurity expert Marie O’Neill of the Queens University Belfast, Director of the U.S. National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering Roderic I. Pettigrew, Minister of the Ministry Environmental Protection Chen Jining and musician Will.i.am. In addition, founder and president of DEKA Research & Development Corp., Dean Kamen, and co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative and director of the Climate and Energy Challenge, Robert Socolow, addressed the summit.