Georgia Institute of Technology School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

It’s a problem many of us can relate to: you take a bunch of photos at an event or on a vacation and then never get around to organizing them. They just sit in your phone’s gallery, or maybe in a folder on your computer. But all the details are often lost to history.

From conversations revolving around parts per billion and EPA standards, to meetings about investment funds, to deliberations on branding and marketing strategy, recently graduated Yellow Jackets Shannon Evanchec and Samantha Becker agree that there’s no such thing as a typical workday when you’ve founded a startup.

A year ago, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering seniors Samantha Becker and Shannon Evanchec were convinced they could change lives in rural villages around the globe. They were about to sell InVenture Prize judges on their antimicrobial cup and lotus flower, which uses copper to kill germs in household water in places like India where contamination with E. coli and other microbes is a significant problem. Now Becker and Evanchec have graduated, and they’re working full-time to turn their creation into a business they call TruePani.

Chloe Johansen, a School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. student, is working on an idea with Assistant Professor Iris Tien they think will make a difference in improving America's crumbling infrastructure. It's work with so much potential that Johansen is working with other Georgia Tech and Emory University graduate students to commercialize her research.