Congratulations to McNair Scholar Marianna Fischer! Marianna, a Mechanical Engineering Technology major, has been selected to receive a CSTEM Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Fund award. With two fellow CSTEM students and mentor Dr. Philip Appel, Marianna proposed development of a household waste incinerator. This product would help keep waste from going to the landfill and develop on-site electricity to both maximize resource efficiency and minimize environmental pollution. The team’s goal is to provide an effective outlet for garbage disposal that can also create electricity. They will use the Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Fund Award to purchase materials to test their prototype’s ability to apply the power generated directly to an appliance.
As part of the award stipulation, the research team will present their work at the EWU Student Research and Creative Works Symposium in May. They have begun building a prototype using funding from EWU’s Technology Commercialization Academy (TCA), through the E-Ship Center. TCA students grow a business idea from the ground up through the process of technology commercialization. Marianna is currently preparing her research from last summer’s McNair Summer Research Internship to present at the Avista Entrepreneur Competition and the Eagles Startup Challenge contests. In all this, Marianna’s goal is to become an expert in small scale energy generation that is better for the environment and can be used off the grid, in space, and for other novel uses.
