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Innovation is in the Air at NYU Tandon's 2026 Capstone Competition

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Students gathering around watching others present their 2026 Capstone poster boards in the MakerSpace Foyer

Student teams display their projects at the 2026 Capstone Competition. Photo Credit: Anand Jagadale

Every year, the Capstone Competition brings together NYU Tandon students from a wide range of disciplines to present their projects and research, displaying innovative ideas and creative solutions aimed at addressing pressing global challenges and advancing modern technology.

This year's competition, held on April 29, 2026, featured more than 40 teams that filled the MakerSpace Design Lab and foyer in an open showcase of prototypes and posters spanning climate resilience, public health, robotics, and beyond. More than 240 attendees engaged with teams and cast votes for the Students' Choice Award.

Separately, six finalist teams were selected to deliver formal presentations and answer questions on technical implementation, manufacturing, funding, scalability, and real-world translation. A panel of judges named three winners who received monetary awards sponsored by Vice Dean for Research Linda Ng Boyle. The winners were:

  • Greatest Social Impact Award — Focus Track (Jane Manalu, Theodore Hua, Vincent Sugianto, Bhavya Sanjana, Marina McMahon), an EOG-based diagnostic tool that analyzes eye movement patterns to deliver faster, more objective, and non-invasive ADHD assessments.

  • Best Overall Design Award — Zero Code Robotics (Rachna Kadam, Ronish Nadar, Pranav Shukla), a natural-language robotics platform that enables users to control and automate mobile robots without coding through AI-driven task planning and computer vision.

  • Highest Entrepreneurial Potential Award — dippin (Dain Lee, Rainbow Li), a portable, rapid test strip that detects methanol contamination in alcoholic beverages within 20 seconds to help prevent accidental poisoning.

In addition to the winning teams, the other finalists were:

  • CoolRoute NYC (Rucha Pingale, Jasper Selchow, Vittoria Giordano, Arnava Dekhne) — A heat-aware navigation platform that uses real-time environmental data to guide pedestrians along cooler, safer walking routes during extreme heat events.

  • CryoFlow (Kalysha Wong, Jushatha Varsha Koduri, Abhinav Patil, Kianna Eddy) — A stormwater interception and micro-hydro energy system that reduces urban flooding while generating emergency clean electricity for climate-vulnerable communities.

  • Pyrolysis to Biochar in NYC (Divya Mudliar, Yug Thakkar, Jiawen Ge) — A sustainable waste-to-biochar solution that converts NYC woody debris into long-term carbon storage and nutrient-rich soil support for urban greenery.

The judges were:

  • Dr. Lee von Kraus, Chief Science Officer, Electric Plant Company; President and Chief Scientist, Open Minded Scientists
  • Rebecca G. Silver, Director, NYU Entrepreneurial Institute
  • Rosario B. Casas, Co-Founder, BCPartners Tech, XR Americas & Brooklyn2Bogota Digital Transformation Community
  • David G. Lefer, Industry Associate Professor, NYU Tandon
  • Andrew Silverman, Founder, Ace Angel Ventures LLC

a panel of judges sitting at a conference table
Judges Panel (from left to right) including Dr. Lee von Kraus, David G. Lefer, Rosario B. Casas, Andrew Silverman, and Rebecca G. Silver. (Photo Credit: Anand Jagadale)

The Students' Choice Award was open to all showcase teams and went to team Portable AI-Enabled EEG for Seizure Detection (Guarien Barone, Will Shang, and Bree Choi), a portable, AI-powered EEG system designed to detect epileptic seizures, including subtle or hidden episodes, to improve early intervention and patient safety. .

The Capstone Competition reflects the NYU engineering community's focus on real-world application, from early-stage ideas through to prototype development. Courses such as EG-UY 3003: The Pre-Capstone Experience prepare students for this type of work by encouraging them to engage directly with potential users through interviews and conversations, helping them understand real needs and constraints before developing solutions.

The 2026 Capstone Competition was organized by the Convergence of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) Institute — Professor Jin Kim Montclare, Pooja Shah, Kaushik Sunder, and Jonathan Sun — alongside Molly Ritmiller and Elizabeth New of the Tandon MakerSpace, with support from the NYU Center for Faculty Advancement and the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute. Student volunteers also contributed to the event, including Anand Jagadale for photography and Muhammadzohir Hidoyatov for assisting with organization.

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