Timothy Treuer, a postdoctoral student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Gund Institute, is the winner of UVM’s first Pitch It, Fab It competition for faculty and staff.
Pitch It, Fab It invites participants to pitch product ideas related to their research to a judging panel. The winner earns the opportunity to work with the staff and use the equipment at UVM’s Instrumentation and Model Facility to take their rough concept to the working prototype stage. Similar contests are held for UVM students and for entrepreneurs in the Vermont community.
Treuer pitched a novel way to combat malaria by using a modified, commercially available bat roost to attract bats to communities at risk for malaria. The roost features an ultrasonic speaker that plays bat calls that will attract those bat species researchers have found to be the most mosquito-hungry. A solution like Treuer’s is needed. After years of decline, malaria is again on the rise as mosquitoes become resistant to pesticides that had previously controlled them.
Treuer was awarded $5,000 in materials and services to develop the prototype with the IMF.
The judges were Richard Galbraith, vice president for research, Linda Schadler, dean of the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences and Jake Kittell, a research engineer at the Instrumentation and Model Facility.
There were six presentations in all at the event, held on April 18 in the Davis Center.
Source: UVM News