Biomedical Engineering alumni win first place in Collegiate Inventors Competition
2025 graduates will receive $10,000 prize, patent acceleration certificate
Three alumni of the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis won the undergraduate first place award at the 2025 Collegiate Inventor’s Competition held Oct. 16 in Alexandria, Va.
Myles (Max) Miller, Nicolas Chicoine and Cameron Freeman, who earned their bachelor’s degrees in biomedical engineering in May 2025, presented their BME Day-winning senior design project from BME 401.
Their invention, Selective Electronic peaNut Sensing Entity (SENSE), is a portable device designed to detect latent peanut presence in foods, helping people avoid exposure to allergens that could endanger them. Hovered over food, SENSE scans for peanut presence and displays results on a smartphone application in under a minute. It has achieved very high accuracy during testing. The group’s faculty adviser was Barani Raman, the Dennis & Barbara Kessler Professor of Biomedical Engineering.
Finalist teams (five undergraduate and five graduate), consisting of 23 students from nine colleges and universities across the U.S., presented their inventions to a panel of final-round judges composed of National Inventors Hall of Fame® Inductees and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) officials.
Established in 1990, the Collegiate Inventors Competition is a program of the National Inventors Hall of Fame and is sponsored by the USPTO. In addition to cash awards, the winning teams also receive a USPTO patent acceleration certificate.
The team also recently won first place in the chemical/biological track at the 2025 Medtronic/Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Student Design Competition.
