The Duke STEAM challenge (dukesteamchallenge.org) is an interdisciplinary cross-campus competition for students combining Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics together in a collaborative project. This year’s competition was directed by the Vice Provost of Academic Affairs, Keith Whitfield and the Director of the Duke Digital Humanities Initiative, Victoria Szabo, and supported by I&E, the Co-Lab, ISS, and HASTAC. The judges were faculty, staff, and students from around campus.

AAHVS was well-represented in this year’s Duke STEAM Challenge winner’s circle:

Sofia Stafford, an undergraduate minor in Art History and Wired! Lab team member, is part of the winning project, "Pocket Counselor.” Pocket Counselor: Health in Hand is a mobile app project built upon the work of Dr. Eve Puffer designed to help “task-shift” mental health counseling to lay practitioners in Eldoret, Kenya. The team will receive $10K to continue developing their project.

Three of the department’s PhD students, Eylul Iscen, Evan Donahue, and Max Symuleski, won third place in the Duke University STEAM Challenge - Digital Humanities competition with their project, “New Media Memex.” New Media Memex is an assistive digital humanities research apparatus inspired by Vannevar Bush’s famous proposal for the Memex device for creating associative trails and links across abstracted documents. The team will receive a $3K award in recognition of their work.

The awards were presented at an event at the Nasher Museum on Saturday, April 23, 2016.

For more info about the competition and awardees please see: bit.ly/dukesteam2016