Here Are the 2026 CIC Finalists! Which Team Will Get Your Vote?

Imagine meeting with world-changing inventors to present your own innovative work, gain valuable feedback and compete for cash prizes. That’s exactly what 10 teams of university students will do at the 2026 Collegiate Inventors Competition^®!

On Oct. 15, five Undergraduate teams and five Graduate teams will gather in Washington, D.C., for this one-of-a-kind event. At the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), each team will present their work to a panel of Judges including National Inventors Hall of Fame^® Inductees and intellectual property experts. Undergraduate and Graduate Winners will receive cash prizes and patent acceleration.

CIC has been recognizing and rewarding the nation’s most promising student inventors since 1990. As we gear up for this year’s competition, we are thrilled to announce our 2026 CIC Finalists! Representing colleges and universities across the country, these students have developed a wide range of exciting inventions that could make a difference around the world.

2026 CIC Undergraduate Finalists

CPRight

Shubham Bansal, Prisha Hemani, Deeya Sharma and Nikhita Vaddineni, University of Washington

Each year, more than 350,000 Americans experience a heart attack outside a hospital, and about 90% of them die. Bystanders are often willing to help but are unable to deliver high-quality CPR. CPRight is a single-use, wallet-sized patch a rescuer places on a patient’s sternum. Displaying simple LED cues, it shows the rescuer, in real time, whether compression depths and rates are effective. CPRight does not require any additional technology or equipment, making it accessible and easy to use when seconds count to save lives.

Flow-IO

Anuk Dias, Shaliny Jadhav and Dilshan Rajan, University of Minnesota

Rapid intravenous (IV) access is essential in emergencies, and in pediatric patients, traditional IV access is often unsuccessful. Intraosseous (IO) needles provide a lifesaving alternative by delivering medications and fluids directly into the bone marrow space. Existing IO devices rely on clinicians’ judgment to select needle lengths and determine insertion depth, introducing substantial risks. Flow-IO is a universal pediatric IO needle architecture designed to replace traditional variable-length needle kits with a single, anatomy-driven device. This invention simplifies emergency medical inventory while eliminating clinician guesswork during high-stress situations.

KAIRS (Knee Artificial Intelligence Rehabilitation Sleeve)

Samanyu Dixit, Hieu Minh Doan, Sahaj Sapovadia and Chinmay Singh, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

After knee injuries and surgeries, patients follow months-long rehabilitation routines. The Knee Artificial Intelligence Rehabilitation Sleeve (KAIRS), a wearable rehab system, continuously monitors the range of knee motion and quality of movement during at-home exercises and everyday activities on the move. With a flexible, sensor-embedded sleeve, mobile app and cloud-based machine learning model, KAIRS delivers individualized progress tracking for patients and remote monitoring for clinicians. This invention could improve rehab adherence, support clinical decisions, enable personalized care plans and expand recovery guidance to patients with limited access to physical therapy.

Lighted Oral Optics for Kids

Ankitha Challa, Andy Corliss, Komal Talloo and Nahom Zerai, Rice University

Millions of families seek care annually for illnesses that require doctors to examine the back of a child’s throat. The standard exam, using a tongue depressor and penlight, has remained largely unchanged in over a century. Team LOOK (Lighted Oral Optics for Kids) developed the Magic Wand, a child-centered system that combines a reusable handheld device, a disposable tongue-depressing attachment, and a secure digital platform for image capture and storage. Its wand-like design and interactive LEDs engage children while improving visualization, documentation and clinical efficiency.

Vaskular

Victoria Makalah King, Dartmouth College

Venous thromboembolism (VTE) occurs when a blood clot in a deep vein, usually in a leg, travels to a lung and blocks an artery. VTE affects up to 900,000 Americans and causes up to 100,000 deaths annually. Vaskular is a wearable, battery-powered compression device that could prevent VTE through individualized therapy. Using synchronized ankle and knee photoplethysmography sensors to monitor blood flow and tissue oxygenation, it adjusts compression pressure, duration and sequencing in real time. Rechargeable and reusable, Vaskular could support patients both in hospital and at home.

2026 CIC Graduate Finalists

BioAxis

Rayan Bargouth and Asser El Ashwah, New York University

Partial-thickness rotator cuff tears affect about 3 million Americans annually. Standard care includes rest, rehabilitation and pain management but does not repair structural damage. Many untreated tears progress to full-thickness rupture. Developed by Vitalis Regenerative Materials Inc., BioAxis is a single-use, point-of-care medical device that combines a patient’s platelet-rich plasma with a prefilled bioresorbable polymer to form a tissue-adherent hydrogel. This closed sterile system combines scaffold reconstitution, controlled platelet activation, and injectable hydrogel delivery to support tendon preservation and repair for patients who don’t meet the threshold for full surgical repair.

ClearView-Jaw

William McKay, Zachary Spears and Amogh Vellore, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

Head and neck cancer patients often need mandibular reconstruction after jaw tumor removal, followed by high-dose radiation. The titanium plates used to secure the reconstructed jaw can distort radiation, shielding tumor cells and scattering the radiation into healing tissue, with about 60% of patients developing a complication within five years. The ClearView-Jaw device reduces harmful backscatter and shadowing while helping clinicians target tumors more precisely, lowering complications and improving patient outcomes.

CoFATE

Bryant Colin, University of Chicago

Nine out of 10 drugs in clinical trials never reach patients. For immune drugs, that failure often begins with a test at the start. Existing tests use one cell type alone, measuring how strong a response is, but not what kind. CoFATE puts two immune cells in one tiny well, a dendritic cell that gives the instruction and a T cell that carries it out. It then reads which of five responses follows. Screening thousands of drugs this way could speed vaccines and treatments for autoimmune disease and cancer.

NeuTrode

Bridget Clift, Cristina Ramirez-Vargas and Addison Whitehead, University of South Florida

Electroencephalography (EEG) helps diagnose and monitor neurological conditions such as epilepsy, sleep disorders and brain injuries. Current EEG technologies consist of wet, semi-dry and dry electrodes, but each presents significant limitations. Providing an innovative alternative, NeuTrode is a flexible EEG electrode designed to maintain consistent scalp contact without the use of gels or liquids. Its soft, comfortable design adapts to different hair densities, skin conditions and head shapes, and it enables faster setup, improved patient comfort and steady, reliable signal acquisition.

SpectraSense

Nathan Day-Holterhoff, Maxwell Mamishev, Rishi Sappidi and Maxwell Stafford, University of Washington

Pesticides play an essential role in modern agriculture by protecting crops from insects, weeds and disease, but their widespread use has raised concerns about chemical residues entering the food supply. Combining fluorescence-based monitoring with embedded chemometric analysis in a compact, portable package, SpectraSense is designed to rapidly detect and classify pesticide residues at the point of inspection. By bringing advanced chemical analysis closer to where agricultural decisions are made, SpectraSense could improve the speed, accessibility and efficiency of pesticide monitoring across the food supply chain.

No video available.

Catch All the Latest CIC News

To learn more about CIC and to find updates on our 2026 competition, keep exploring our website.