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  • Innovation and Research
Accolades & Honors

Here's who won the student pitch competitions at Blast Furnace Demo Day

Two people hold up a giant check

Seventeen teams of student entrepreneurs vied for $4,000 in cash awards in the Blast Furnace student idea accelerator’s Demo Day at the William Pitt Union. The December pitch competition was the capstone event for the program’s sixth cohort of student entrepreneurs.

The $2,500 top prize went to Jared Raszewksi and Emelyn Jaros, undergraduates in the Swanson School of Engineering, for their innovation, DisSolves, a packaging solution developed to make mixing protein-powder drinks less messy. The team plans to use the prize money to develop the prototype for their innovation, a dissolvable wrapper that holds a liquid drink mix.

The $1,000 second prize went to the Ideal Can team, led by Brant Orlowski, an undergraduate in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. The trash can design automatically ties a trash bag and can be emptied with no lifting.

The $500 third prize went to Jack Glasl, a student in the College of Business Administration, and Mamadou Ndiaye of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, for Investing Young, a personal finance education program aimed at high-schoolers.