Wentworth Students Take Home Top Prizes at the 17th Annual Muddy River Symposium
Roxbury Sunflower Project
The Muddy River Symposium—a locally-renowned climate change awareness event—returned for the 17th time and a handful of Wentworth Institute of Technology students provided standout presentations.
The Symposium took place on the Simmons College campus, sponsored by the Colleges of the Fenway (COF) Center for Sustainability and the Environment and the Muddy River Restoration Maintenance and Management Oversight Committee. In addition to an inspiring keynote speech by Dakota artist Erin Genia and a celebratory film about the Muddy River’s reclamation, the audience enjoyed the work of 30 student teams from across the consortium, who presented posters in four categories: Sustainability Science, Water, Environmental Justice, and Local Social Action. Wentworth students took home top prizes in two categories.
Under Sustainability Science, Wentworth Engineering students Daniel Slutskiy, Miroslaw Wierzbicki, and Marina Chuery won for their project “Internet of Things Waste Management Conversion Kit.” They are designing a sensor that will send an alert when public trash receptacles near capacity.
In the category of Local Social Action, a multi-institutional team including Wentworth students Chrisoula Moraitis, Christy Haig, and Megan Leger won for their "Roxbury Sunflower Project.” This team, which also included seven other COF students, launched a campaign to activate the special properties of sunflowers in reducing soil toxicity in urban neighborhoods.
Wentworth senior Moraitis explained that the team were all students in the COF Environmental Forum, which brought in community leaders who showed students ways of contributing “to sustainability, community strength, and advocating for ourselves, others, and the environment. I hope to continue to grow my relationship with the Roxbury Sunflower Project and help inspire the cleansing and beautification of the land we inhabit each day.”
Congratulations also go to Wentworth students Jesse Sarkisian, Maggie Becker, Sophia Fascione, and Kristina Arabatzis, who presented on their project “Carbon Sequestration in Lawn Using Compost.” In the fall of 2022, this team won a $500 grant from the COF Center for Sustainability and the Environment to pursue this project on our campus.
Many other Wentworth students presented on an array of research, designs, and prototypes: Bemnet Hailemariam, Gavin Juan, Ryan Torr, Justin I. Hobart, Ray Lu, Nate Worthley, Alexa Bellezza, Liam McCarthy, Olivia McManus, Sarah Sollauer, Adam Oehmen, Moises Fernandes, Nana Acheampong, Quy Tran, Sam Bogonis, Matt Taylor, Aaron Lundgren, Petraq Xheka, Ivan Korotich, William Hua, Andrew G. Lee, Patrick Ryan, Ryan Santos, Khalifa Almoayyed, Jacob Fahnestock, Brianna Chery, and Abdullahi Ibrahim. Congratulations to all of the students for their impressive work, and thanks to the professors who have advised them.