Orange County Cube Exhibit for Bacteria and Plastics Detection – Industry Track

The Orange County Cube Museum is developing new exhibits for children to learn more about the effects of humans on our waterways and environment. In particular, they are interested in showing children how pollution affects our waterways, and how contaminants such as plastics enter our water and can significantly affect our ecosystem. By showing children how we can use bioengineering principles to detect pollutants in our waterways, we hope to encourage children to enter STEM fields and bioengineering disciplines. Using technology developed in the laboratory, the goal of this project is to create a robust and fun-to-use exhibit that automatically analyzes water samples from a cuvette for pollutants and bacteria. The exhibit should be “child proof” but still allow children to take different water samples from the Orange County area. The cuvettes will enter a conveyer belt that will then take the samples and perform fluorescence imaging techniques to determine the level of plastics and bacteria in each sample, and provide an easy-to-understand and interactive readout for the children to learn about areas that contain high vs. low pollutants. Project Mentor: Engineering Mentor: Christine King, PhD, Department of Biomedical Engineering, UC Irvine, kingce@uci.edu, Michelle Digman, PhD, Department of Biomedical Engineering, UC Irvine, mdigman@uci.edu Physician Mentor: None Team: Member Last Name Member First Name Lead? Email (@uci.edu) Groisman Luciano Yes lgroisma Mandalia Tejas Krishen tmandali Moreno Nasser Santiago morenons Wilkinson Toni Lynn twilkin1 Zinkewich Josefina Maria jzinkewi