Surreal week & amazing people - Part 3

Sunday Nov 11-Tue Nov 13

"So, what's in the box?" I asked.
"Our gizmo... Spherical drive system..you know, like the wheel of Batman' motorcycle," the guy sitting next to me answer. His friend opened the box showing a weird looking wheel entangled with power cords and wires.
"..it took us sometime at the airport check point to explain that this is not a bomb"
I was in the Limo bus from the Washington Dallas airport to the hotel. Sitting next to me were three undergrads..one Chinese, one Indian, one Russian. They were one of CIC finalists from San Jose State U.

      For nearly 20 years, an organization called Invent Now put together CIC..a national competition of student inventors across the US. This year there were seven teams of undergrads and seven teams of grads selected for the final round judging at USPTO in Virginia. The "inventions" can be anything..from biotech..to electronic..to medical device..to robot...to aviation control systems. I and my colleague in the lab were lucky enough to in the final round..(for our work in DNA data storage..I'll talk about that in the blog sometime)..it was really an eye opening experience just to interact with these folks from totally different research areas. I'm also very surprised that we made it to this round given that almost all other contestants have taken their works very far toward application: a Turkish guy from UCSD already patented his drug delivery system..and raised money to start a company around it, a Egyptian guy from Wynes State U already got interest from GM for putting his autonomous combustion devices to automobile. .. Well, I'm still debugging these E.coli in the lab.
     The judging session was one Monday. Each team needed to present their work to the judge panel..it was a close room..with one big TV screen..the team and the panel..an the camera man...no one else (that gave me the same feeling as Qual). Most of the judges, for grad and undergrad sections, are "distinguished senior inventors"..well, I can't think of any more fancy words for that...We had Dr.Fogarty (inventing balloon catheter), Dr.Hoff (inventing first Intel CPU), Dr.Langer Keck (inventing fiber optic)..Dr.West (inventing electret microphone)..Dr.Sasson (inventing digital camera)..Mr.Starkweather (inventing laser printer) ..etc...What impressed me even more was how carefree these people are.. After judging session, we all went out for dinner together..contestants and judges. On the bus and around dinning table, we chatted random stuff and joked around.. Without reading their Bio, I wouldn't be able to imagine these funny grandpas & uncles were among the greatest inventors of our times.
     We had a ceremony on Tuesday at Newseum in D.C., host by NPR's Neal Conan. ....and yes, we did had a round table chat with Dr. Holdren (Obama's science advisor) at the Whitehouse.

    I did't get a medal...well but that CIC trip was one of a lifetime experience.