Patriot Pitch Competition

George Mason entrepreneurs win big at the 2025 Patriot Pitch Competition

Greg Johnson — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 15:34:46 +0000

George Mason entrepreneurs win big at the 2025 Patriot Pitch Competition Greg Johnson Wed, 04/23/2025 - 11:34

“Let me be clear, innovation has always been, and will always be, the solution to the world’s challenges,” said Patriot Pitch emcee Patrick Soleymani, associate dean for outreach and strategic engagement at George Mason �鶹��'s Costello College of Business. “Innovation transforms potential into power and drives us forward as an institution, community, and ultimately a civilization.”

Patriot Pitch emcee Patrick Soleymani addresses packed house in the Johnson Center Bistro. Photo by John Boal Photography

As emcee of the 2025 Patriot Pitch Competition, presented by 22nd Century Technologies Inc., Soleymani addressed the packed house. Eight final teams—two from each track—had been refining their business models with their mentors and practicing their pitches for several weeks in preparation for the afternoon’s competition.

Housed within the Costello College of Business, the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) led the programming efforts and organized the final pitch event on Thursday, April 10. Ajay Vinzé, dean of the Costello College of Business, reiterated the importance of entrepreneurship and what it meant to the college’s namesake.

“In 1976, Donald and a partner founded Century Stair Company, which grew to become one of the largest stair manufacturers on the East Coast,” he said. “His passion for entrepreneurship is here with us, in spirit. Today, we are honored to have his trusted former business partners, Joe and Peg Contrucci, with us in the room.”

George Mason �鶹�� President Gregory Washington was also in attendance, along key stakeholders from the George Mason entrepreneurial ecosystem.

After Ava Uppal, BS Marketing ‘19, interviewed technology founder and executive Sid Banerjee (founded Clarabridge that was acquired by Qualtrics in 2021 for over $1 billion) in an illuminating keynote discussion, the competition commenced—this time with a record amount of prize money.

Mason's Choice Award winners. Photo by John Boal Photography

One by one, finalist teams in the STEM, Social Impact, General Entrepreneurship for Undergraduate Students, and General Entrepreneurship for Graduate Students and Recent Alumni tracks took the stage to make their pitches to four judges—subject matter experts chosen for each track—and to the audience of George Mason community members. Following each 5-minute pitch, the presenting team fielded questions from the judges. Students in between classes quickly filled the back of the Johnson Center Bistro as they cheered on their classmates and friends.

Anticipation filled the air as another Costello alumnus and community leader, Jason Howell, BS Accounting ‘97, took the stage to announce the winners:

STEM

First place: Barty AI (Sahil Jagtap)
Second place: Q Haven (Caden Green)

Social Impact

First place: CarbonSecure (Maddie Gray, Maha Raja, Ryland Plodpluang, Juan Zambrano-Lozano)
Second place: The Allocated at Delia’s House (Marisela Zelaya Delcid, David Osorto)

General Entrepreneurship Undergraduate

First place: Valor (Caleb Fink)
Second place: NOVAFoam (Ethan Ford, Trevor Geissler, Mikhail Ivanov, Stephano Barra)

General Entrepreneurship for Graduate Students and Recent Alumni

First place: Viralbite (Emmanuel Nwokeabia)
Second place: EchoPods (Raghu Manjunatha, Pooja Manjunatha Swamy)

George Mason Emmanuel Nwokeabia presenting Viralbite. Photo by John Boal Photography

Following each track of presentations, audience members scanned a QR code on the screen to vote for the separate Mason’s Choice Awardees. The winners were The Allocated at Delia’s House and Viralbite.

Emmanuel Nwokeabia, a 2024 graduate of the Costello College of Business, received the most prize money—$13,000 between his two awards. “This was more than a win—it was a powerful encouragement to pursue my vision. I encourage anyone with an idea to take that bold step, and see how the world responds,” said Nwokeabia.

The 2025 Patriot Pitch Competition showcased the entrepreneurial spirit of the Costello College of Business and George Mason �鶹��. Approximately 250 audience members attended to watch the innovative concepts and products being pitched.

2025 Patriot Pitch participants

In This Story

Ajay Vinzé

Patrick Soleymani

Jason Howell

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Students pump the brakes on car collisions

Nathan Kahl — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 10:40:05 +0000

Students pump the brakes on car collisions Nathan Kahl Thu, 06/06/2024 - 06:40

Traversing any crowded, busy roadway brings myriad safety risks and demands on a driver’s attention. And even the most careful of drivers can’t control those driving around them, particularly the ones creeping up from behind.

The UR 2 Close team won first place and the Mason's Choice Award in the Public Engagement Track of the 2024 Patriot Pitch Competition. Photo by Ayman Rashid/Office of �鶹�� Branding

“Don’t you dread the sound of screeching brakes from the car behind you, as you brace for the impact?” asked Emma Devine, a George Mason �鶹�� systems engineering and operations research student who was part of a team—appropriately named “UR 2 Close”—that won two contests and finished second in another for their work on investigating rear-end collisions.

Devine and teammates Amanda Dalagan and Aidan Menon took first place in the public engagement track at the Costello College of Business Patriot Pitch Competition and in the general engineering track at the General Donald R. Keith Memorial Capstone Conference at West Point. Solutions are sorely needed, as rear-end collisions account for nearly one-third of all automobile accidents each year, resulting in thousands of deaths.

“We conducted a detailed analysis of crash data and found that most rear-end collisions occur on straight segments on highways, in good weather conditions, and in the late afternoons and evenings. This was a surprise,” said Dalagan.

The team’s solution is a license plate visual indicator. “There is presently no product designed to help drivers maintain safe following distances," Menon said. "There are heads-up displays and automated braking systems; those work to make sure you don't rear-end someone but do not protect you from being rear-ended. We thought a defensive approach would separate us from the pack.”

The team developed a simulation of vehicle dynamics during braking and accounted for driver reaction time, braking efficiency, and road conditions, concluding that following distance was a key criterion resulting in a rear-end accident. Observing a local road revealed only 20% of vehicles maintained a safe following distance.

Rear-end accidents account for 1/3 of all auto collisions. Photo from iStock

“The Virginia Commonwealth Driver Regulations requires drivers to maintain a two-to-three second separation. But humans can't see time,” said Devine. “The solution to preventing rear-end collisions is to provide the following driver a clear indication of a safe following distance.”

Earlier this year the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration finalized a new standard mandating automatic emergency braking technology for all passenger cars and light trucks by September 2029, which will no doubt further help with such collisions.

“It was a privilege to sponsor this student team,” said Skip West, founder and CEO of Maxsa Innovations, a company that markets automotive products. “This project really emphasized the importance of systems engineering in doing analysis to understand the real problem before spending time and money developing a solution that may not work. These accidents are an important societal problem that we need to address, and this team has made a great start.”

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Systems Engineering and Operations Research

Students

Patriot Pitch Competition

College of Engineering and Computing

Students win contests designing delivery drones that respond to real-time wind change

Nathan Kahl — Wed, 08 May 2024 13:09:04 +0000

Students win contests designing delivery drones that respond to real-time wind change Nathan Kahl Wed, 05/08/2024 - 09:09

Part of the charm of tiny Tangier Island, located smack dab in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, is that in some ways it seems stuck in time, with residents speaking an outdated dialect and relying on crabbing for a living. What isn’t so endearing to residents about their simple life is the need to take a ferry to the Eastern Shore to obtain necessities, such prescription medications. Such a trip is an all-day affair, often causing people to miss work and lose wages.

But now Riverside Health System and DroneUp, a delivery service based in Virginia Beach, are working with a team of George Mason �鶹�� students to deliver medications via a small drone. But even that poses challenges.

“As a part of my systems engineering senior design project, my team and I performed a context analysis and a stakeholder analysis to find the performance gaps for a case study about drone delivery to an island located in the Chesapeake Bay–Tangier Island,” said senior Diana Machuca, who is majoring in systems and industrial engineering. “To bridge the gaps, we designed the Drone Range Dynamic System and came up with a business plan for the project.”

“The route is 15 nautical miles (NM) from Onley, Virginia, to Tangier Island,” said team member Darius Jack. “The route traverses both land and terrain resulting in significant wind shifts, including onshore and offshore winds, depending on the time of day.”

Depending on a drone’s design, it can be very sensitive to wind, requiring extensive analysis. Team member Grean Ramos said, “We developed an aerodynamic simulation of the drone and its batteries. The simulation showed that the 15 NM route is close to the drone's range limit. Any unexpected headwind could result in the drone running out of battery and needing to land before reaching Tangier Island.”

“There are weather stations at Onley and at Tangier Island airports, but no weather stations in-between," said team member Diana Machuca. "We analyzed one year of hourly wind data from the airports and found that headwinds would prevent the drone from reaching the clinic 32 percent of the time.”

Team members Gurkirt Tahim, Darius Jack, Grean Ramon, and Diana Machuca

So the team developed a Drone Range Decision-support System (DRDS). The DRDS uses the aerodynamic simulation described above to continuously monitor the range-remaining as the drone flies. If the simulation estimates that the drone has experienced an unexpected wind and will no longer have enough battery power to reach the destination, it recommends the drone operator to return home (if it can) or to land safely in designated landing zones. Simulations showed winds would require the drone to return home 17 percent of the time.

The team’s plan won First Place in the STEM Track in the Patriot Pitch Competition, a annual contest sponsored by the Costello College of Business at George Mason, and First Place in the Systems and Analytics Track at the Sage Memorial Design Competition, a student-focused international forum for the design of complex systems.

“Working on this project was an amazing experience,” said Jack. “We had to use all the system engineering knowledge and skills we learned over the past three years. Building systems in the real-world is hard, but perseverance and creativity pay off.”

Topics

Drones

Systems Engineering and Operations Research

aeronautics

Patriot Pitch Competition

entrepreneurship

Students

Pitch Perfect: Entrepreneur hopes to change lives and inspire others

Colleen Rich — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 14:15:51 +0000

Pitch Perfect: Entrepreneur hopes to change lives and inspire others Colleen Rich Wed, 03/13/2024 - 10:15

When Shrishti Singh came to George Mason �鶹�� for her doctoral studies, she had a goal in mind: developing a new technology that would allow the visualization of cancer in deep tissue and perhaps enable earlier diagnoses.

Using a combination of FDA-approved dyes for photoacoustic imaging, Singh created an injectable contrast agent that attaches to tumor cells and increases the visibility of those cells against the background tissue.

Singh completed her PhD in bioengineering in 2022, but her relationship with the university continues. During her time at Mason, Singh has used all the tools the university provides to bring her discovery to the marketplace.

In April 2023, Singh was on one of the 15 teams that competed for $40,000 in prizes at the Costello College of Business annual Patriot Pitch Competition. She took home first place and the Mason’s Choice Award in the competition’s science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) track.

In November 2023, Singh was at Mason Square pitching her technology at Mason’s annual Accelerate Investor Conference, which attracts more than 400 entrepreneurs, investors, students, and members of the Washington, D.C., entrepreneurial ecosystem. She was awarded $2,000 for her efforts.

“I'm a researcher by training. I've been trained to present at scientific conferences so talking in front of an audience was not difficult for me,” said Singh. “The difficult part was assimilating all of the business information that I've learned so far into a presentation or a slide deck, and to be able to present that in a time-constrained environment.”

Singh, now a postdoctoral fellow at Mason, has cofounded a company, NIRView Biosciences, with her bioengineering faculty mentors Remi Veneziano and Parag Chitnis, and Singh and NIRView Biosciences have been designated a 2023 Virginia Small Business Development Center (SBDC) Success Story.

“As we develop the company, [Veneziano and Chitnis] are involved in creating strategy and vision of the company, along with helping me write grants and obtain funding,” she said. “They provide me with mentorship on the technology front to be able to take this company forward.”

Singh and her cofounders were a few of 30,000 entrepreneurs who participated in a Virginia SBDC workshop, seminar, or training in 2023. Through its 16 programs, the Virginia SBDC, which is part of Mason Enterprise, helped 10,000 businesses, provided 40,000 hours of one-on-one counseling, offered 1,600 training programs, and incubated more than 550 companies with an impact of $3.36 billion. Of the businesses served, 61% were woman-owned, 46% were minority-owned, and 15% were veteran-owned.

Mason researcher Remi Veneziano, Shrishti Singh, and Parag Chitnis cofounded NIRView Biosciences. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of �鶹�� Branding

“The SBDC has been one of our biggest supporters,” Singh said. “I work extensively with my SBDC mentor, Elizabeth Pyle, who is always ready to be to give us advice on how to take the business forward.”

Singh and Veneziano participated in SBDC’s Innovation Commercialization Assistance Program (ICAP), a no-cost incubator that helps technology start-ups from ideation to initial funding and beyond. They worked with ICAP’s life science business mentors over the course of a year to position their technology for successful commercialization, and in 2023 they were accepted into the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, which provides financial support and experiential education to help university researchers commercialize scientific discoveries.

“The support of SBDC has been tremendous,” said Singh, who also has a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from the �鶹�� of Bridgeport in Connecticut and an engineering degree from Ramaiah Institute of Technology in Bangalore, India. “My training has been on the scientific front, so SBDC helped me learn different aspects of the lean business model canvas, customer discovery, and product-market fit, which was a new learning curve for me.”

Singh said while she chose Mason originally for its diversity, it is the people and community here that have made a difference in her life. “I have made friends, and I have gained mentors that are still an active part of my professional life,” she said. “I have been able to take this education and put it toward a better professional vision that I've always wanted. I can say Mason is the reason I have been able to accomplish a lot of my dreams.”

Costello College's Patriot Pitch Competition supports idea and early-stage business ventures and is open to current Mason students and recent alumni from all majors/fields of study.