Student team combines disciplines to score in international competition

An unlikely combination of students teamed up for last semester’s E-Waste Design Competition and it paid off. Dustin Gallegos, a recent graduate in electrical engineering from Guayaquil, Ecuador, Lily Hislop, a sophomore in bioengineering from Lake Placid, N.Y., and Charley Xi, a freshman in general studies leaning toward mechanical engineering with a bioengineering minor from Vancouver, Canada competed for Illinois.

They placed third (silver) in the reuse category with the design for creating a fluorescence microscopy instrument using a recycled paper scanner. The international competition is part of the Sustainable Electronics Initiative (SEI) at the University and coordinated by the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC).

“I was very glad with the group we put together precisely because of the richness in perspectives,” Gallegos said. “There were various instances throughout the project where this diversity helped us innovate our design. Also, it was fun getting know Lily and Charlie. They are both interesting and smart teammates.”

The group’s idea proposes converting a commercial flatbed scanner into a fluorescence microscopy instrument, used to characterize biological events in diagnostic and research laboratories. The optical design allows for the scanner sensor array to be exploited as an imaging sensor without making major modifications to the recycled device.

The team’s design was engineered to be cost-effective and simple, yet it performs at high rate as an imaging instrument. Fluorescence microscopy is a low cost means of studying behaviors of cell populations, which can help determine the presence of diseases or the cause of diseases. The cost-effectiveness of reusing recycled paper scanners for fluorescence microscopy devices should help proliferate opportunities for studying cell populations, helping to eliminate waste and save lives in the process.  
Gallegos, Hislop, and Xi received $1,000 for placing third.

“I’m very pleased we placed and more than a little surprised,” she said. “There were some really excellent submissions. The second and first place entries in our category were awesome.”

The first place platinum winners in the reuse category were students from the University of Wisconsin-Stout who designed a digitizer to repurpose film cameras for use as digital cameras, receiving a $3,000 prize. The second place gold winners, also from the University of Wisconsin-Stout created “The Wake Up Project,” a smart alarm clock build from reused cell phone parts and plastic recycled from e-waste.

Gallegos, who remained on campus after graduation to work with the nonprofit Brighter Futures, came up with the idea for the fluorescence microscopy early in the fall semester and then, looking for students to help with the biological elements, sought out Hislop and Xi through a biomedical engineering student group. Gallegos had just started working on a research project that aimed to make fluorescence based tests portable so the subject was fresh in his mind, but the only issue — selecting a device that was both recyclable and up to the task.

“So one night I was just thinking about it at my desk and I looked at my scanner/printer and it just clicked! Gallegos said.
“Each piece of the project flowed naturally into the next, so it wasn’t too difficult,” Hislop said. “We had planed on trying to detect viruses at the beginning, but it quickly became apparent that viruses were way out of our imaging capabilities so we focused more on imaging large bacteria and tissues.”

They started work in late September and worked intensively for about a month until the competition deadline in November.
Joy Scrogum, a coordinator for the competition and a research specialist for the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, said she was impressed with this year’s crop of submissions, noting that the 19 entries spanned a total of eight countries, the most ever for the competition in its fourth year.

“Some of the students will present it as if they’re advertising a product that’s in production even though it’s just a concept,” she said. “And they’ll talk about the product website and maybe show their mock up of what the website would look like and in some instances the jurors were like, they really need to do that, that looked really good.”

While the competition does not require a prototype or a mock up — as an international competition, students submit videos presentations for their projects to be judged by a panel of five — Gallegos said he plans to put together a prototype in the near future and attempt to submit it in a competition for recycled devices sponsored by Dell.

“It was always my intention to build devices of much lower costs, to be used by people in developing places,” he said. “So if a commercial device comes out of this idea, it would be to be sold to non-profits that need them in the field.”
In the meantime, Gallegos said the team has a few other interesting ideas and might give the competition another try next year.
“But hopefully this time, we are going to start much earlier,” he said.
__________________________

Writer/Photographer: Chad Thornburg, Engineering Communications Office

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.