Jingjing Fan, a graduate student in the Cullen College's civil and environmental engineering department, delivered an award-winning elevator pitch at the Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization's (SNO) first ever Nano Pitch Contest.
The contest, which was held in Boston as part of the SNO's annual conference, challenged 16 graduate students hailing from universities across the country to deliver a 100-second pitch about their nano-related research. The contestants could only rely on a single slide to back-up their pitch.
Typical research pitches, also known as elevator talks, last about 2-3 minutes. For the Nano Pitch Contest, participants were limited to only 100 seconds because, as the SNO notes, "nothing is nano beyond 100nm."
Fan received a cash prize for her elevator pitch, which explained her research on antimicrobial activity of nanostructured molybdenum disulphide. Her advisor on this work is Debora Rodrigues, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the the Cullen College and the winner of last year's Emerging Investigator award from the SNO.
Because of the success of the Nano Pitch Contest in Boston, the organization will be holding another Nano Pitch Contest at the SNO conference in Portland later this year.