Water-Sampling Device Beats Other Finalists For Top Prize at UCSB’s New Venture Competition

Today’s methods of sampling water, explained UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering student Rahul Sangodkar, are expensive and difficult to execute, making it hard to pin down the true effects disasters like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill have on the environment.

The solution that Sangodkar and his fellow students Kyle Neumann, Edixon Puglisi, and Anjana Krishnan devised was OSMO, a water-sampling device the size of a coffee maker that Sangodkar said has significantly lower costs and labor requirements than traditional methods, and provides an unprecedentedly comprehensive set of data on the water it samples.

The competition by the university’s technology management master’s program runs from October through the spring and is intended to provide students with the understanding and experience necessary to launch their own startups companies.

More than a dozen teams, made up primarily of graduate students from various disciplinary fields, were whittled down to six for Thursday’s finals. During fall quarter, groups formed their ideas and business concepts before taking intensive courses in the winter and developing a business model.

By Sam Goldman, Noozhawk