Many of the projects in this year’s expo integrated AI with custom hardware. The Clinical Handwashing Coach, which tracks handwashing sessions, is being tested at a hospital in Pasadena, California. The team of electrical engineering students designed an AI system to ensure that medical professionals comply with handwashing protocols. Other teams from the department used AI to create noise-canceling headphones with real-time language detection and translation (team ANURA) and a wearable device that inexpensively creates digital transcriptions (CLACS).

A couple of projects tackled wheelchair comfort and mobility autonomy. The Mechanical Engineering team STAR (Self-Transfer with Automated Reversing) Lift made moving in and out of a wheelchair easier for wheelchair users with upper-body mobility, allowing them to transfer themselves to a bed without assistance. Team Wheel-E created a specialized seat cushion for wheelchair users that helps alleviate the painful symptoms of prolonged sitting. 

Urban green infrastructure was the main theme for many projects in the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. The Morningside Park Rehabilitation Project reimagined the local neighborhood park by proposing two new community centers for public use and an upgraded drainage system that can handle heavier rainfall runoff. 

From AI devices to reimagining a neighborhood park, the Class of 2026 proved that the best engineering goes beyond the classroom and makes an impact in the world.

Costis Maglaras, dean of Columbia Business School, opened the event in a room where he spent more than two decades as a faculty member. "The program that we just launched is interesting and valuable, both to us here at Columbia and back in Athens," he said. Maglaras described how the program came about, first as an informal exchange that turned into a WhatsApp conversation and, eventually, into a collaboration spanning institutions and continents.

"Most of the time in academia you come up with good ideas and nothing happens," he told the audience. "We're executing, and we're actually getting it off the ground."

Dora Varvarigou, professor of electrical and computer engineering at NTUA, emphasized that the collaboration had been a long time coming. "I thought you were never going to ask us to start this thing," she told the Columbia organizers with a laugh before explaining the vital mission of HIAS, which aims to draw on the talents of Greek scientists across the world to foster scientific excellence to advance knowledge and support human well-being.

The afternoon's speakers traced paths from research bench to commercial product in three of the program's focus areas: AI, health technology, and sustainable materials.

Elisa Konofagou, the Robert and Margaret Hariri Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia, described two decades of work developing focused ultrasound techniques that can open the blood-brain barrier to deliver drugs directly to the brain. Her lab's technology has been spun out into a company called Sono Therapeutics.

"You are the first inaugural class, so you are our guinea pigs," she told the student audience, urging them to use the week to reflect on what the program had given them. Her broader message to aspiring founders: expect the journey to take longer than you think.

Antonis Lazanas, head of portfolio and index research at Bloomberg, offered a view from quantitative finance, arguing that the real entrepreneurial opportunity in AI lies in building the tools that make agents faster, cheaper, and more reliable. After noting that ethics was his least favorite course at NTUA, Lazanas struck a more philosophical chord, saying, "We need ethics, we need philosophy, so that we can make use of all this power in a way that's going to renovate us, not destroy us.” 

Kostis Kaffes, an assistant professor of computer science at Columbia and an NTUA alumnus, presented his lab's work on AI agent infrastructure, including techniques for reducing latency and token costs in multi-step agent workflows. He echoed Lazanas’ point about where opportunity lies. 

"The verification and the reliability of agents will be a major infrastructure issue, and that's extremely hard — no one has solved it yet. If you have good ideas on that, you might make a lot of money." His advice to the room was direct: stay out of hardware and foundation models, and look for deep-tech problems at the infrastructure layer where a genuine moat is possible.

Helen Lu, Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and senior vice dean at Columbia Engineering, closed the technical portion with a 20-year account of engineering synthetic ligaments and degradable scaffolds for orthopedic repair. Her most memorable lesson came not from a success but from a regulatory stumble: years into developing a tissue scaffold, her team discovered the solvent they were using for manufacturing fell into the wrong FDA safety class.

Rather than see it as a setback, she reframed it. "I turned the safety issue into an opportunity to actually improve the product," she said. Her takeaway for the NTUA founders: "Think of the end first."

A panel of Columbia Lab to Market alumni — Fotis Tsitsos, Parth Gami, and Chrisha Nario — shared firsthand perspectives on navigating the startup landscape, while a second panel gave the NTUA participants, including Elpida Oikonomou, Stavros Mouratidis, and Anna Maria Papakonstantinou, a forum to offer feedback on the program itself. The event closed with a reception where student teams presented their work. 

Meet the winners

In first place, winning $25,000, was Routerr Health, a smart logistics platform for mobile at-home healthcare, pitched by Brendan Stec MBAxMS’26. Routerr Health, Stec explained, was born from a gap in the $70 billion at-home care market. The number of U.S. adults who are 65 or older is driving demand for at-home care. Providers are struggling to match patients with at-home clinicians, causing delays in care.

Routerr Health streamlines the process, helping teams organize hundreds of incoming orders from patients and match the right staff to the right patient. Routerr Health also uses AI to automate dispatching decisions.

“This helps teams serve more patients, right-size their clinical staff, and eliminate the daily dispatching errors that cause so many issues for patients and the clinicians,” Stec told the judges.

Coming in second place, with a prize of $15,000, was MariStarboard, pitched by Yuta Morimoto MBAxMS’27, Nat Suwattananon MBAxMS’27, and Andy Pasricha MBA’26BUS. MariStarboard plans to use autonomous underwater robotics to solve what the founders described as an inefficiency problem in global maritime infrastructure. 

In their pitch, the team explained that barnacles and other organisms get stuck on a ship’s hull, increasing drag. The reduction in fuel efficiency costs the shipping industry upwards of $200 billion annually. Before a ship’s hull can be cleaned, a specialist must conduct an inspection, which is costly and time-consuming. MariStarboard’s software streamlines the costly and time-consuming process of hull inspection by using drone-captured video and an AI model. The system allows ship owners to conduct this inspection on demand, making it easier and cheaper to clean ship hulls. 

Third place went to Plasmole, an AI research partner for molecular biology, pitched by Aditya Kulkarni MS’26 and Paul Yoo MS’22, who won $10,000 for the project. The platform provides AI tools to assist biologists at every stage of research, from hypothesis to publication, streamlining research and documenting it in one app. The beta version has already been a hit with scientists at Cornell and NYU.

Dr. Masaki Suwa, the head of corporate research and development at Omron, and the president and CEO of OMRON SINIC X Corporation, said, “Our Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) solutions play a central role in ensuring the quality of printed circuit boards. Because Columbia’s MPS technology is robust to spurious reflections when inspecting mirror-like surfaces such as solder joints, dies, and chip surfaces, it has proved essential to reliable 3D inspection. As electronic components continue to miniaturize, a technology like MPS that can capture 3D shapes with high precision will become increasingly important to printed circuit board manufacturing.” 

It is rare for a technology developed in a university laboratory to achieve large-scale adoption in a fast-moving and highly demanding field such as factory automation. 

“The successful commercialization of Micro Phase Shifting underscores both the strength of Columbia’s creative fundamental research and the value of close collaboration between academia and industry to bring breakthrough innovations into real-world manufacturing environments,” said Ofra Weinberger, director of Columbia Technology Ventures at Columbia University.

”When we began this research project, we were motivated by a fundamental question: How do you recover accurate 3D information when light behaves in complex and non-ideal ways?” said Gupta. “We showed that by coding light smartly, one could separate the true 3D signal from the noise due to interreflections — a long-standing open problem in 3D imaging. Seeing that idea evolve into a method deployed at scale to help ensure the reliability of critical technologies has been a career highlight.” 

By creating an approach adopted by industry, the researchers demonstrated the value of academic research in bringing fresh ideas and rigorous thinking to business.

“Academic researchers explore a wide spectrum of problems, ranging from theoretical questions that seek to advance the knowledge base of the field to novel solutions to known practical problems,” Nayar said. “It is exciting to see one of our innovations solving a critical problem in the manufacturing of products we use on a daily basis.”

For more information about MPS technology, please visit the project page.

Lead Photo Caption: An artist’s rendering of micro phase shifting. 

Lead Photo Credit: Anna Collevecchio/Columbia Engineering