Winners Announced After Oshman Engineering Design Showcase

For the first time, two senior engineering teams, Brays Yourself and Rice Outstenting, tied for the top prize in the George R. Brown Engineering Design Showcase, held April 14 at Rice University’s Tudor Fieldhouse. Each was granted the top prize of $5,000 for the Excellence in Engineering Award.

“Even simple solutions can make a big difference in people’s lives,” said Margaret Watkins of the Rice Outstenting team, which designed a device to simplify the process of removing ureteral stents from children. “This whole project was focused on streamlining it and making it as fast as possible.”

The win completed a great week for the team, which also won the grand prize for student design at the annual Design of Medical Devices Conference in Minneapolis on April 12. “We’re absolutely amazed,” Watkins said.

Brays Yourself designed modifications to portions of the Brays Bayou channel in Southwest Houston and redesigned the corresponding Greenbriar Bridge. The team’s goal was to reduce the 100-year floodplain

throughout the bayou in order to protect commercial development and the Meyerland neighborhood, which suffered extensive damage in the 2015 Memorial Day flood and April 2016 flooding.

“This is huge because, traditionally, we don’t see a lot of civil engineering teams winning the showcase,” said team member Kasia Nikiel. “It’s more people who make really cool prototypes. So this is really big. We worked really hard on this and we think it’s a really great project.”

The annual public event, put on by the George R. Brown School of Engineering and the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, features senior capstone design and other projects by Rice undergraduates. Over 80 judges made up of engineering alumni and local industry helped with the poster session competition, which is open to all engineering design projects for each discipline of engineering.