Judge Panels

Dr.  Shantonio Birch is a first-generation college student, an immigrant, and a recent Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. graduate from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. As part of his Ph.D. dissertation, he has laid the foundation for tackling a decades-old stalemate on the room temperature heating and cooling performance of thermoelectric materials, and has recently transitioned into the role of Founder & CEO of ThermoVerse, LLC. Ever since leaving the University of Michigan, Birch has been working full-time engaging community partners (Ann Arbor SPARK and A2ZERO), industry partners, government and national lab partners (the City of Ann Arbor, the Oak Ridge National Lab, the Argonne National lab, and the National Renewable Energy National lab), university partners (University of Michigan, Lawrence Tech, and Vanderbilt), and legal (Aurora Consulting and Varnum Law) in his vision for a clean and equitable transition to net-zero energy.

Dr. Anna Jade is a senior project manager at Robert Bosch LLC, responsible for launching gasoline fuel injection components for the automotive market. She received her Bachelors (2011) and Masters (2013) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan. Her research work focused on tailoring the mechanical properties of carbon nanotube composite materials. She no longer has any research interests, to the disappointment of her graduate research advisor. 

Dr. Neha Pankow is the Head of Strategy and Business development at Bengaluru Science & Technology Cluster (BeST) in the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India.

For the last few years, she has worked on developing and managing data-informed policymaking for basic science research and education at the National Science Foundation (NSF), USA. Her primary responsibilities included ROI reporting, management of diversity initiatives, and facilitating site visits for a facility funded at 100 million USD/year. In addition, she was assigned to handle an 18 million USD cooperative agreement for a sea-level rise project on coastlines and people. Her cross-disciplinary academic research spans 11 years with flavors of engineering, single-molecule biophysics, and cancer cell biology. The transition from bench science to the policy was facilitated by a prestigious science policy fellowship from the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Sciences). Prior to this, as an American Cancer Society post-doctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her publication in Nature Chemical Biology on the use of light-activated enzymes offered a novel way to study the role of specific enzymes in signaling mechanics.  Dr. Pankow performed her doctoral research on changes in single-molecule kinesin mechanics in response to microtubule modifications at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. 

In her role as the Head of Strategy and Business Development at the BeST cluster, Dr. Pankow hopes to facilitate cross-sector synergies for achieving tangible science & technology research outcomes for the public’s welfare. 

Dr. Greg Sommer, PhD is an R&D Director at Labcorp and serves as Labcorp's Scientific Discipline Director for Alternative Sample Collection technologies., overseeing the design, validation, and deployment of new decentralized liquid microsample collection technologies for clinical diagnostics. Dr. Sommer was previously a Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Sandstone Diagnostics, Inc., which was acquired by Labcorp (NYSE: LH) in 2021. Sandstone's products included the Trak Male Fertility Testing System, and the Torq Zero Delay Centrifuge System for remote blood sample collection and stabilization. Dr. Sommer was recognized as a 2015 Bay Area "40 Under 40" by Diablo Magazine. Prior to Sandstone, Dr. Sommer was a Senior Research Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories where he led R&D in point-of-care diagnostic technologies for biodefense and emergency preparedness applications, most notably the Sandia SpinDx system. He is a co-inventor on over 20 patents in microfluidic and clinical diagnostic technologies, and has served as Principal Investigator for several DoD, DoE, and NIH funded research projects. Dr. Sommer received his PhD and MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and BS in Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University.

Dr. Yuqing Zhou is a research scientist at Toyota Research Institute of North America (TRINA). He does research in design optimization for elastic, fluidic, thermal, electrochemical, and other Multiphysics systems with applications in next-generation vehicle development and future mobility applications including hydrogen fuel cells, thermal management of hybrid and battery-electrified vehicles, and lightweight composite structures. He received his Doctorate (2018) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan. Dr. Zhou holds multiple issued patents, presents regularly in international conferences, and has published more than 15 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He also has served as session co-organizer/review coordinator for the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conference (IDETC), and session chair/invited industry panelist for the World Congress of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization (WCSMO).