CITRIS and the Banatao Institute at UC Santa Cruz has selected five student teams to receive 2025–26 Tech for Social Good awards.
This year’s recipients are:
Accessibility navigation project
Traversing the UC Santa Cruz campus poses many challenges for people with disabilities. Some routes are steep, unpaved or uneven. The accessibility navigation project aims to create a campus map tool centered on accessibility to help users find alternative routes to fit their needs. Team members: Nicolett Nufio, Aarna Pathare and Bhavani Seetharaman.
AIRWISE
To address gaps in air quality monitoring in low-income and rural communities, AIRWISE is creating a solar-powered network of air quality sensor nodes that can operate independently of Wi-Fi. Team members: Charan Nemaru, Sankritya Rai, Theodore de Swiet and Julius Villa.
Gateways digital literacy jail courses
Through a structured design process that uses creative technology, digital skill-building and music-making, Gateways is reducing the digital divide for incarcerated individuals. While working on their final projects, students develop transferable skills and develop portfolios to support their reentry into their communities after incarceration. Team members: Jackie Eskelin, Robin Pannu, Daisy Sanchez and Amy Urzua.
Slugiculture
Farmers often only discover major problems, such as crop damage or pest outbreaks, after they have become severe. While larger farms can afford technology to support early intervention, smaller farms face avoidable losses. The Slugiculture team is developing a cost-effective, easy-to-use system to aid farmers in discovering destructive circumstances earlier. Team members: Andrea Arreortua, Connor Bengston, Cole Bickell, Dhimant Khuttan, Jake Lee, Audrey Luan and Morgan Masters.
Task-conditioned prosthetic vision simulator
Current prosthetic vision systems, which use electrical stimulation to create visual perception for people with retinal disease, treat all visual information equally. The student team will develop a prosthetic vision encoder that uses artificial intelligence to automatically understand and prioritize visual information to provide users with clearer, safer and more useful vision. Team members: Aljon “Jiro” Claveria, Nathan Lam and Nathan Lee Yang.