The competition for best R&D projects has been held at ITMO annually since 2016. Eventually, teams selected as winners will have to present full-scale prototypes complete with technical documentation, as well as potential for scaling and commercialization.
During project defenses, heads of participating student teams presented the results and answered the committee’s questions about their projects’ compliance with technical requirements, potential development, and commercialization opportunities. Vladimir Nikiforov, ITMO’s Vice Rector for Research, headed the expert committee. You can watch live streams from all three defense days here, here, and here (all in Russian).
Vladimir Nikiforov. Credit: ITMO.NEWS
This year’s winners are:
- Evgeny Nikolaev, project on developing a production technology for biodegradable materials and studying biodegradation properties;
- Viktoria Egorova, project on developing a device for non-invasive screening of gut microbiota;
- Maksim Semynin, project on designing a 3D octupole trap for localization of ionic quasi-coulomb structures;
- Ilya Prokurov, project on developing fiber-optic cable assemblies based on expanded beam optical connectors for the aerospace industry;
- Anna Kamarchuk, project on developing an underwater system for health monitoring of freedivers;
- Mark Novikov, project on developing a module charger for small electric vehicles;
- Daria Durneva, project on producing ADF-4 protein found in spider silk through gene modification of E.coli bacteria;
- Maksim Yakovlev, project on developing and assembling a photon quantum CNOT gate based on integrated optical Mach-Zehnder interferometers and Y-connectors;
- Alla Uvarova, project on developing a wide-band high-aperture microlens.
Now, the winners will have to prepare for another defense – this time, of their projects’ first stages, which is scheduled for late June. Then, the experts will evaluate the technical design specifications compiled by the teams.
