Two postgraduate student teams from the School of Engineering collected two out of four First Place Awards at the 2013 GE Foundation TECH Award in Shanghai in Dec 2013.
 

The 2013 GE Foundation TECH Award is open for the MPhil and PhD engineering students from top universities, and it is the first time that HKUST has been invited by the organizer. In a keen competition with more than 100 proposals, only four teams received First Place Awards. The two winning teams from the School are MPhil students Hoi Lam Chan and Ho Pan Lo, Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE), and PhD student Chubin Ou and MPhil student Jiaqi Wang, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE).

The ECE team was awarded for their project “Remote Controlled Underwater Robot for Drainage Channels Maintenance”. Chan is supervised by Prof Tim Woo and Prof Wai Ho Mow and Lo is supervised by Prof Bert Shi.

The MAE team was awarded for their project “Novel Patient-Tailored Vessel-Conformal Stent (新型3D擬形血管支架)”, which expresses innovative ideas in medical advancement. The students are supervised by Prof Matthew Yuen.

Ou and Wang designed a patient-tailored stent in hopes of delivering more effective and safer treatment for patients. A stent is a mesh “tube” used to reopen a narrowed blood vessel or “block” an aneurysm. They explained their 3D conformal stent is the first stent tailored for the patient's vascular structure. Unlike traditional straight tubular design, the new stent is pre-shaped to a curved shape as the target vessel of the patient, thereby better fitting the vessel without causing excessive damage on the vessel wall. Demonstrating technological innovation, this new solution integrates various advanced technologies, including 3D medical imaging, virtual stenting, 3D printing, processing of shape memory alloy and biodegradable materials.

In addition, ECE MPhil student Fengyu Che collected a Third Place Award for his VLC project in the preliminary round contest. His supervisors are Prof Patrick Yue and Prof Kei May Lau.

The GE Foundation TECH Award, administered by the Institute of International Education (IIE), is designed to stimulate innovation in new technology, design, research methods and applications among university students in China. Not only do students have a platform to display their innovation capabilities in areas such as energy, water and electronics engineering, they also have an opportunity to earn an internship at the GE China Technology Centre.