Two ME Grad Students Finalists in Business Plan Competition

Two Mechanical Engineering graduate students, Rohit Kumar (below, left) and Alok Priyadarshi (below, right) and their start-up company, Terplicators Inc., are finalists in the University of Maryland's Hinman CEOs Business Plan Competition scheduled for May 9 at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. They will be competing against five other finalists.

The idea for Terplicators, Inc. is to develop software modules that will enable mold manufacturers (with applications such as plastic parts for consumer goods, toys and prosthetics) to easily design molds from Computer Aided Design (CAD) data and 3D scanned data at the click of a button.

Alok is a graduate student working with ME Associate Professor S.K. Gupta. This technology was developed under Dr. Gupta's Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award. Dr. Gupta is also a part of the start-up company. Alok was one of the first place winners out of 116 competitors in Graduate Research Interaction Day (GRID), an annual event that provides a common platform for presentation of propriety research as part of a cross-disciplinary graduate research competition.

Rohit is a graduate student working with ME Associate Professor Jeffrey Herrmann. He has performed the market research for this business idea.

Published May 1, 2003