Celebrating the 2025–2026 Conrad Challenge Award Winning Teams
The Conrad Challenge Innovation Summit brought together student innovators from around the world to showcase bold ideas, entrepreneurial thinking, and STEM-driven solutions to some of today’s most pressing global challenges. This season, students from more than 70 countries collaborated across oceans on more than 1,500 projects, developing original innovations in Aerospace & Aviation, Cyber-Technology & Security, Energy & Environment, Health & Nutrition, and The Water Challenge.
Held at Space Center Houston, the Innovation Summit gave finalist teams the opportunity to present their work to expert judges, connect with mentors and industry leaders, and celebrate the creativity, courage, and determination that define the Conrad Challenge experience.
At the Conrad Challenge Innovation Summit Awards Ceremony on April 25, 2026, the top student teams were recognized for their ingenuity, technical skill, entrepreneurial promise, and potential for real-world impact. The highest honor, Pete Conrad Scholar, was awarded to teams whose innovations stood out across their respective categories. Additional teams were recognized as Power Pitch Award recepients and through special awards celebrating excellence in creativity, service, progress, and innovation.
We are proud to recognize this year’s Conrad Challenge award-winning teams and celebrate the next generation of innovators who are already imagining — and building — a better future.
Category | Aerospace & Aviation
Pete Conrad Scholars
Aphelion
Integrated Multi-axis Ailerons
California, USA
Team: Landon Kummer, Tobin Palmer, & Brandon Kirbyson
Coach: Edward Kummer
In space, every gram and watt matters. The bigger a satellite is, the more propellant it consumes, the larger, and more expensive it must be (one extra kilogram often equates to $25,000 more in launch costs), in addition to diminished range. With the orientation control module often being the heaviest subassembly, its optimization is demanded. Lightweight, power-efficient steering-system actuators for better, low-cost satellites is Aphelion. Aphelion integrates the required multi-axis control in a single actuator by using a novel spherical motor, controlled by our proprietary control algorithm. This is in the place of conventional complex, heavy gimbaled mechanisms. Aphelion’s preliminary prototype achieved 20% less mass, 61.8% volume savings, and a 71% power reduction when compared to current technologies. With a licensing model of an estimated ~$60M per year, Aphelion will provide radically smaller, cost-effective solutions to the $1.7B small satellite-steering market.
Power Pitch Award
Flux Orbital Solutions
O.R.B.I.T. — Orbital Reduction
and Braking Inductive Technology
India
Team: Amaay Gupta & Aarnav Kashyape
Coach: Surinder Gupta
Low Earth Orbit is becoming increasingly congested; hence regulators now require satellites to demonstrate reliable end-of-life disposal as a precondition for launch approval, turning post-mission disposal from a best practice into a mandatory subsystem decision. Electrodynamic tethers offer a mass-efficient, propellant-free deorbiting method validated through missions such as TSS-1R, Plasma-Motor-Generator, and YES-2, yet remain rarely adopted. Existing EDTs rely on single-point-releases and healthy spacecraft systems, making them difficult to license or operationally qualify as post-mission disposal systems. O.R.B.I.T. introduces a failure-independent deorbiting architecture: a standalone EDT deployment system removing single-point-activation failure, separating launch safety from end-of-life execution, and operating independently of host-spacecraft health, allowing deployment even if the host is dead. Delivered as a compact, integrable deorbit module for CubeSats and small satellites, O.R.B.I.T. turns validated EDT physics into an operationally credible and adoption-ready disposal-solution for operators who must now buy compliance in order to fly in a crowded LEO economy.
Category | Cybertechnology & Security
Pete Conrad Scholars
VOCL
Echo Pulse
Illinois, USA
Team: Idhant Ranjan, Atharva Vaze, James Zhou, Craig de Fiesta, & Jayden Chiou
Coach: Ranjan Bhartiya
In a quiet room in Naperville, Mr. Zhou, an 82-year-old stroke survivor, cries because he cannot say “I love you” to his grandson. He’s not alone. 7.5 million Americans with speech disorders face the same silence. Their brain’s function, but their ailing muscles trap them in their bodies. Current solutions fail them. AAC tablets cost $10,500, forcing users to type at a miserable 10-15 wpm. That’s 10 times slower than natural speech. Brain Implants? $50,000-$100,000, require high-risk neurosurgery, and exclude the majority of patients. Our non-invasive, LLM-powered headset decodes attempted speech directly from facial muscle signals (EMG), converting silence into audible voice, real-time. By leveraging economies of scale, we aim to deliver medical-grade speech restoration for ~$2,500, significantly cheaper than market standards. Our goal isn’t just to restore speech, it’s to restore people’s fundamental right to be heard.
Power Pitch Winners
DiveGuard
China
Team: Hao Ting Lyu, Qing Ying Cao, Bai Xuan Ye, Yuanhao Zhang, & Jia An Pan
Coach: Zhi Heng Dong
DiveGuard is a cost-effective underwater short-message communication system for recreational divers, underwater workers, and marine operators. It addresses a critical safety gap in underwater activities—the inability to communicate, coordinate, or send emergency signals due to the failure of radio transmission in water [R3].Unlike traditional dive computers or standalone logging devices, DiveGuard uses low-cost underwater acoustic communication to enable real-time, text-level messaging between divers and surface teams, improving situational awareness and emergency response in low-visibility, zero-network, or high-risk environments. The market opportunity is substantial. The global dive tourism market (TAM) is approximately USD 12.4 billion, with smart diving devices representing a USD 216 million SAM. DiveGuard’s initial focus on Southeast Asia defines a USD 6.48 million SOM. With growing diver participation and industry digitalization, DiveGuard is positioned as a scalable and affordable underwater safety standard.
Category | Energy & Environment
Pete Conrad Scholars
The Bee Initiative
BeeGuard
California, USA & Massachusetts, USA
Ethan Liang & Rory Hu
Coach: Yanin Wu
Without honeybees, one-third of global crops would fail, collapsing a $577 billion agricultural system. Yet beekeepers lose 40% of colonies annually with US losses alone costing $15 billion. Existing solutions are inadequate: manual inspections detect problems too late, while $300+ hardware monitors metrics without diagnosing causes. BeeGuard is the first temporal multimodal AI diagnostic for beehive health. Our web application analyzes videos using computer vision, acoustic analysis, and behavioral tracking to identify varroa mites, queenlessness, and hive robbing with 94.7% accuracy in under one second at zero hardware cost. Field validations across four colonies demonstrate detection weeks before visible symptoms, with 100% intervention success. Serving 10 million beekeepers managing 100 million colonies worldwide, plus agricultural enterprises and pollination brokers, BeeGuard projects $18 million Year 5 revenue through tiered subscriptions and verification services. With a $488 million global market, BeeGuard enables proactive colony health management globally.
Power Pitch Award
OctoScope
China
Team: Shou Jeng Chan, Max Au-Yeung, Lucas Wong, Caden Wong, & Season Lam
Coach: Kenneth Tang
Large shipping canals like the Suez can generate US$10 billion annually, yet a single disruption can cripple economies. An accident during 2021 caused a 6-day blockage in the vital waterway connecting Europe and Asia, leading to billions to be lost upon multiple institutions, blocking trade routes. Detrimental incidents like these can occur every few years. Fortunately, we have a solution. The OctoScope is an all-in-one, flexible solution to canal monitoring. We provide a multitude of services, including extensive canal monitoring and debris removal. Compared to current alternatives that rely on fixed infrastructure, we offer no gaps surveillance, providing underwater visibility whilst staying versatile and cost-effective. This minimizes canal blockages, driving global shipping efficiency and prosperity. Canal authorities, shipping and insurance companies rely on these waterways, creating a broad customer base. We estimate a positive net income in our infant year, increasing to US$14M with a ROI of 61% by 2035.
Category | Health & Nutrition
Pete Conrad Scholars
The Cartographers
OncoMap
Washington, USA
Team: Anshul Raghav & Krishay Singh
Coach: Eric Holland
Each year, nearly 1.4 million people worldwide suffer from head-and-neck cancer, one of the most aggressive solid tumors that damage a patient’s ability to speak and breathe. Immunotherapy, specifically PD-1 inhibitors, has rapidly grown in its use to treat cancer, especially in head-and-neck cancer. However, the main problem is that head-and-neck tumors have the lowest immunotherapy rate at 15-30%, meaning that clinicians pursue this therapy without knowing its efficacy on the patient, racking up treatment costs beyond $150,000 per patient. To address this gap, we developed OncoMap, a two-stage platform with an RNA sequencing-based ML model for immunotherapy response prediction and a k-nearest-neighbors framework that contextualizes oncogenic features for hyper-personalized treatment. With thousands of hospitals and clinical institutions currently treating cancer, our business plan has a large target demographic, where we would implement our deployable models to be used alongside diagnosis to guide treatment plans.
Power Pitch Winners
Vigil
Vigil Headband
Georgia, USA
Team: Shaunak Buche, Vishwa Rajan, Vedant Kalipatnapu, & Vedant Mehta
Coach: Michael Roberts
Vigil is redefining patient safety by bringing affordable, continuous vital-sign monitoring to hospital beds that have traditionally been left unmonitored. Today, most general wards, especially in rural hospitals, nursing homes, and low-resource countries, rely on 4–6-hour spot checks, allowing preventable patient deterioration to go unnoticed. Vigil solves this with a contactless, battery-powered monitoring device paired with an encrypted, online, AI-driven dashboard. Using radar, thermal, and motion sensors, the system continuously tracks heart rate, respiration, temperature, and movement, learning each patient’s baseline and alerting clinicians to early signs of decline. Our solution delivers ICU-level insight at under $100 per bed, without consumables or complex maintenance. Customers include hospitals, NGOs, and senior-care facilities seeking better outcomes, lower ICU transfers, and reduced staff burden. With tiered hardware pricing and recurring software subscriptions, Vigil combines global health impact with a scalable, profitable business model poised for rapid adoption worldwide.
Category | The Water Challenge
Pete Conrad Scholars
Soaring Seeds
Smart Backwashing Safe Water System for Plateau Pastoral Areas
China
Team: Xiaotong Mi, Yi Yi, Jingyi Qian, Zhihan Dong, & Muyan Li
Coach: Jianya Gu
Our innovation targets the core issue of the persistent “safe water gap” in the western plateau pastoral regions of China to serve millions of nomadic households. Through four consecutive years of field-based philanthropic work since 2021, we observed that herders at remote summer grazing sites, lacking basic infrastructure, are forced to consume untreated surface water with high turbidity and contaminants. Existing alternatives are ineffective: household purifiers require stable electricity and tap water, while portable outdoor products fail under sustained high turbidity (filters clog within days) and often risk damage from freezing residual water. Our product is the first solution designed specifically for this context. Centered around a granted utility model patent, it achieves “one-button, dual-action” smart backwashing and complete pipeline drainage, simultaneously solving the key challenges of water purification in high-altitude pastoral areas: filter clogging, secondary contamination, and freeze damage.
Power Pitch Winners
BlueFlow
HydroSpines
California, USA
Team: Diba Sarhangnejad, Claire Yu, Sidney Sun, Olivia Yu, & Amelia Woo
Coach: Megha Shah
Over 4 billion people experience water scarcity, and 2 billion lack access to safe drinking water. Existing solutions (like Watergen or desalination) depend on electricity or expensive infrastructure, making them ineffective in remote, low-resource, or low-humidity regions where water is needed most. Introducing HydroSpines, a passive, cactus-inspired nano-water harvester that pulls moisture from the air without any energy input. Using TiO2-coated, nano-grooved polylactic acid (PLA) spines modeled after cactus needles, each unit produces around 6-10 liters of filtered water per day using gravity and hydrophilicity. Our customers include outdoor enthusiasts like hikers, retailers like REI and Patagonia, and NGOs such as The Water Project. With the atmospheric water market projected to exceed $6 billion by 2034, HydroSpines plans to capture 10% of that market, enabling steady growth. Our dual-impact model reinvests 7% of profits to deliver units to water-scarce communities, making clean water possible in the world’s most difficult environments.
Special Awards
Equinor “Searching for Better” Award
OctoScope
China
Team: Shou Jeng Chan, Max Au-Yeung, Lucas Wong, Caden Wong, & Season Lam
Coach: Kenneth Tang
Large shipping canals like the Suez can generate US$10 billion annually, yet a single disruption can cripple economies. An accident during 2021 caused a 6-day blockage in the vital waterway connecting Europe and Asia, leading to billions to be lost upon multiple institutions, blocking trade routes. Detrimental incidents like these can occur every few years. Fortunately, we have a solution. The OctoScope is an all-in-one, flexible solution to canal monitoring. We provide a multitude of services, including extensive canal monitoring and debris removal. Compared to current alternatives that rely on fixed infrastructure, we offer no gaps surveillance, providing underwater visibility whilst staying versatile and cost-effective. This minimizes canal blockages, driving global shipping efficiency and prosperity. Canal authorities, shipping and insurance companies rely on these waterways, creating a broad customer base. We estimate a positive net income in our infant year, increasing to US$14M with a ROI of 61% by 2035.
Donald James Citizenship Award
Kipos
Substation
New York, USA
Team: Juha Kim & Jaden Pedro
Coach: Joseph Ceriello
Every year, subways move hundreds of billions of passengers while wasting enormous amounts of energy as heat and vibration. Aging networks, like New York City’s 121-year-old system, are impossible to rebuild, yet they continuously hemorrhage energy as cities face rising grid strain and climate mandates. SubStation retrofits existing subway cars with compact hybrid thermoelectric and piezoelectric modules that convert this wasted energy into electricity without disrupting operations. Each module can recover over 900 kWh per year, powering onboard systems and offsetting nearly 20% of auxiliary loads. Our primary customers are public transit agencies seeking to lower operating costs, cut emissions, and reduce grid strain. We enter through direct pilot sales supported by government-funded demonstration programs, then scale through fleet retrofits, manufacturer partnerships, and licensing across a $40+ billion global market of over 200 metro systems worldwide. Don’t Rebuild, Reclaim.
Donald James Citizenship Award
TermoPaint
Panama
Team: Nathalie Díaz & Jimena Girón
Coach: Karin Sempf
Rising global temperatures are making indoor spaces unbearable, especially in buildings not built for extreme heat. Many families rely on air conditioning, but HVAC systems produce 5.5 billion tons of CO₂ every year, driving up energy costs and worsening climate change (Heating and ventilating review, 2023). TermoPaint offers a smarter solution by stopping heat before it enters homes. Our fully VOC-free, durable thermal paint delivers passive cooling by reflecting sunlight and insulating roofs and walls. Its eco-friendly formulation incorporates repurposed agro-industrial waste transformed into an advanced insulating nanomaterial, creating a circular economy solution while boosting performance. The result is cooler, healthier, more comfortable indoor spaces, reduced energy consumption, and lower emissions, all without electricity. We will start with zinc-roofed households in Panama’s Central Provinces, selling directly to consumers, then scale through pilot projects and partnerships with housing developers, hardware retailers, and distributors across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Glinsky Expo Exhibit Award for Most Persuasive
VisionBridge
China
Team: Ziji Hu, Jizheng Li, Tianyi He, & Yufei Liu
Coach: Warisi Mijieti
Visually impaired individuals have a strong desire to perceive the world in the same way as sighted people. However, existing visual assistive tools suffer from functional limitations and high costs, making them unable to meet the demand for a high-quality life. So, we have developed the VisionBridge, which consists of AIVision for real-time environmental perception and AIBridge, an active obstacle-avoidance device. The system also supports text interpretation and personalized voice interaction. We have applied for one software copyright for the server-side interface design of the glasses. Meanwhile, we are in the process of applying for one utility model patent for the momentum-wheel-driven blind guidance cane system. Core target customers include visually impaired individuals, as well as institutional clients such as schools for the blind, federations for persons with disabilities, and elderly care facilities. In the future, we plan to expand into daily assistive scenarios for the elderly with low vision.
Glinsky Expo Exhibit Award for Best Tabletop
StarSeeds
Gia’s Outpost
Texas, USA
Team: Varshini Gandreddy, Dhiti Koyya, & Raaga Bukkaraju
Coach: Sampath Bukkaraju
From the first tracks of the Sojourner rover, our journey to Mars has been a search for life. Now, as NASA and SpaceX plan three-year missions, the question is no longer “is there life,” but “how do we sustain it?” Gaia’s Outpost is the answer, bringing green to Mars, Green on Red. Our technology transforms toxic Martian regolith into a life-sustaining ecosystem, manufacturing fertile soil on-site. For astronauts, this provides a permanent source of fresh nutrition, natural oxygen, and a vital psychological “Earth-link” to combat isolation. For our customers, which are national agencies and private companies, this $800,000 module is a mission-critical asset that eliminates the impossible cost of shipping supplies. With a $24B market potential, Gaia’s Outpost isn’t just an innovation; it is the essential infrastructure to finally call the Red Planet home.
Space Center Houston Best Entrepreneurial Innovators
AeroLattice
Virginia, USA
Team: Shiv Davay, Sidh Jaddu, Svaran Medavarapu, & Parthiv Maddipatla
Coach: Badrish Davay
Commercial aviation faces a hidden crisis known as the HighLift Paradox. The flaps required for landing generate Dirty Drag, which is an aerodynamic penalty. This turbulence compromises safety during emergency go-arounds and forces engines to burn excess fuel while creating noise. Enter AeroLattice, the first smart, 3Dprinted titanium flap retrofit. By replacing the inert solid trailing edge with our porous gyroid lattice, our system breathes air to suffocate drag inducing vortices before they form. Targeting the 18,000+ Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 fleets, AeroLattice is a B2B retrofit kit designed for routine maintenance installation. By reducing approach noise by 4 dB and lowering landing phase fuel burn, we generate $250,000 in value per aircraft. We transform environmental compliance into profit and unlock a $1.8 billion market by making the global fleet cleaner, quieter, and safer.
Alumni Leader Council (ALC) Award
Ella Bianco | ALC Co-Lead
Excellence in Education Award
Matais Campos | Coach of CeliusVorox
Aashna Saraf | Coach of ExFire & TagAlong
