A cadet research team from the Department of Chemistry and Life Science tied for First Place at the DARPA Service Academies Innovation Challenge (SAIC) in Arlington, VA. Team SENSA tied with Air Force for their project Axon-Sorting Nerve Guides: Giving Prosthetics the Sense of Touch. Please congratulate CDTs Minhee Pak, Haana Yu, Patrick Mullin, Rebecca Lee, Annette Yoon, and Grace Yu for their inspirational work. The work was motivated by wounded soldiers who suffer terrible injuries relating to nerve damage. The main project is to develop a scaffold to repair large gaps at injured sites that can ultimately be used to sort different nerve axons to give prosthetics a sense of touch.
Nine teams - three each from the U.S. Air Force Academy, U.S. Military Academy, and U.S. Naval Academy - squared off in a competition at DARPA’s offices to show projects designed to develop practical and potentially transformative technologies that could address a wide variety of challenges facing the U.S. military. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) works to ensure the superiority of U.S. military force technology. The SAIC works to excel and promote promising talent for the next generation of military leaders in a unique environment that blends academic research with a deep understanding of current and future military needs. SAIC works to cultivate the great potential of these future officers and encourage their career-long interest in research and collaboration with DARPA.
The panel of DARPA Service liaison officers judged each project with the most weight toward whether the project addressed current or anticipated future Defense Department (DoD) challenges over the short and long term. The judges also evaluated whether each project’s approach was significantly novel and technically feasible to create transformative capabilities to significantly improve existing technologies. Team SENSA’s research is sponsored through DoD funding in particular by the MRMC through the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP). The project is advised by LTC Luis Alvarez, Dr. Alex Mitropoulos, and Dr. Joe Loverde.