IDEA Labs

Washington University student group IDEA Labs received the Spirit of St. Louis Award at the St. Louis Regional Chamber’s 2016 Arcus Awards for advancing the city’s rich history and global reputation as a hub of innovation and forward-looking vision.

About 200 Washington University students in medicine, engineering and business recently gathered in the Cortex Innovation District for a networking event known as “Problem Day.” The event kicked off a seven-month effort for student entrepreneurs to develop innovative solutions to clinical problems. 

Interdisciplinary student teams presented innovations designed to solve problems in health care at IDEA Labs’ Demo Day last month. Engineering student Matthew Burkhardt (seated) won a summer internship through the university’s Skandalaris Center to continue developing his team’s invention. His teammates are (from left) Yuni Teh, Katrina Leyden, Adina Stoica and Elizabeth Rosenberg.​

IDEA Labs will host its second annual Demo Day April 18. Medical and engineering students from the Medical and Danforth campuses will demonstrate prototypes for inventions they created to solve a variety of health-care problems.

School of Medicine faculty recently presented about 20 ideas to Washington University students during IDEA Labs’ inaugural ‘Problem Day’ in hopes that they might be able to devise solutions. IDEA Labs — which stands for Innovation, Design & Engineering in Action — is a bioengineering design incubator founded last year as a joint venture of the schools of Medicine and Engineering & Applied Science and the Division of Biology & Biomedical Sciences.