Wednesday, December 23, 2020

XPRIZE Awards Prizes For Next Generation Mask Designs

Los Angeles-based XPRIZE, the nonprofit which uses prizes to encourage the development of solutions to some of the world's biggest challenges, says it has awarded prizes for a challenge it has been running to develop next generation masks, which it kicked off shortly after the issues with masks came to light with the pandemic. According to the nonprofit, it has awarded $500,000 to the top team in the challenge, Luminosity Lab, which is developing a mask which uses a "bifurcaterizd filtration chamber". The top team was founded by five students out of Arizona State University--ikhil Dave (age 20), Tarun Suresh (age 22), Katie Sue Pascavis (age 19), John Patterson (age 22) and Jerina Winter Gabriel (age 20). XPRIZE also said it has awarded two teams $250,000 each for their own designs--Polair from John Hopkins University in Maryland and Naija Force from Abuja, Nigeria. XPRIZE said it received entries from 992 teams in 76 countries.