In 2025, George Mason University’s Systems Engineering and Operations Research (SEOR) students proved that innovation thrives where engineering meets entrepreneurship. Their projects solved real-world problems and captured top honors across national competitions.
At Patriot Pitch 2025, Team CarbonSecure—Maddie Gray, Maha Raja, Ryland Plodpluang, and Juan Zambrano-Lozano—claimed first place in the Social Impact Track with a web-based carbon credit platform designed to simplify and secure carbon offset purchases. Team NOVAFoam—Ethan Ford, Trevor Geissler, Mikhail Ivanov, and Stephano Barra—earned second place in the General Entrepreneurship Track for its synthetic lumber solution aimed at disaster relief housing.
These entrepreneurial wins echoed at the STAR-TIDES Poster Competition, where Team LogistIQ—Christopher Wilson, Dyar Aziz, Max Hollant, Markus Garretson, and Salma Awad—won first place for a drone-based agricultural surveillance planning tool. CarbonSecure followed with second place, and NOVAFoam earned an honorable mention.
The momentum did not stop there. CarbonSecure dominated the Accelerate Investor Conference, taking home $10,000 against 33 competitors, while LogistIQ earned the Outstanding Project Award at the College of Engineering and Computing Research Celebration. In fact, across 15 competitions, senior design teams achieved nine first-place finishes and $21,000 in winnings, including top honors at the Andrew P. Sage Memorial Design Competition. Their projects ranged from carbon offset risk assessment tools to drone pilot training systems, each tackling urgent, real-world challenges.
Graduate students also made their mark. PhD candidate Pavithra Sripathanallur Murali won the Association for Computing Machinery‘s Special Interest Group on Simulation and Modeling Best PhD Student Paper Award at the Winter Simulation Conference and, alongside MSc graduate Nischal Newar, earned second place in the Data Analytics and Information Systems Mobile/Web App Competition for an emergency response app, Go-Rescue.
These achievements position SEOR as a national leader in systems thinking, sustainability, and innovation, preparing graduates to tackle complex challenges in aerospace, cybersecurity, healthcare, and beyond.