The Lemelson-MIT nationwide program recognizes and inspires young STEM inventors. This year, they awarded $75,000 in student prizes to three undergraduate teams and three individual graduate student inventors in several categories with creations in healthcare, transportation and mobility, food/water and agriculture, and consumer devices.

Their student prize program is open to teams of undergraduate students and individual graduate students. Team Augeo, which includes Siddharth Iyer, Jasmine Hu, Mathias Insley, Diane Lee, and Eric Lin from Johns Hopkins University, were rewarded with $10,000 under the “Cure it!” category. This category recognizes healthcare technology-based inventions.

Team Augeo’s invention draws attention to treating hemorrhages and embolisms that occurs during surgical procedures. Internal bleeding affects millions of people worldwide, and the only current solution is expensive, difficult to use, and does not universally fit every blood vessel size. Augeo’s innovative new material can quickly expand to many times its size by filling with blood, resulting in a low cost, simple solution that permanently stops bleeding in the many blood vessel sizes throughout the body.

The team members are all materials science and engineering students in the Whiting School of Engineering and the Institute for NanoBioTechnology.

“Our team was very excited when we were selected as winners in this year’s Lemelson-MIT competition. This marks an important milestone on our journey towards revolutionizing the way embolization procedures are performed, and we are ready to carry this momentum through to next year,” said team leader Siddharth Iyer.

Winners were selected based on the overall inventiveness of their work, the invention’s potential for commercialization or adoption, and youth mentorship experience.

“We’d like to thank all of our advisors Hai-Quan Mao, Luo Gu, Órla Wilson, and Christos Georgiades — whose guidance and encouragement proved invaluable in getting us to this point. I would also like to thank my fellow team members for all their incredible ideas and work,” said Iyer.

Read the full announcement on the Lemelson-MIT website.