April 7th Mentor Meeting

Today we had our usual meeting with Dr. Shah to discuss our week's progress.  Marketing reported on the rough cost analysis they completed and recorded in a Google spreadsheet ("Pricing"--I shared it with you guys).  The projected cost for the materials that make up the ice box, excluding PCM, currently stands at about $27.  We also have an estimate on how much money we're saving from preventing vaccines from being exposed to freezing temperatures (assuming those vaccines are spoiled upon exposure).  Last, we took a look at the WHO and UNICEF vaccine carriers, and benchmarked some prices.  As of now, we're at least competitive.  Moving forward we need to do the final calculation matching our product up to the field.  Marketing had some help from team members from other subteams-- Sahil and Ravi.  The commitment of all our team members never fails to inspire me, and I really think it'll prove fruitful both for our team in the short-term, and the world in the long-term.  Glad to know all of our teammates and be part of FRESH.

Not to get too mushy, I'll keep going with the minutes.  Matt had an idea on testing the technological advantage of using our approach surrounding using sensors on the PCM against the existing approach involving the shake test.  More details to come from the PCM team on how they will do this.  Quint, Amina, and Amanda plan to go in to Dr. Shah's lab tomorrow at noon to set some experimental goals and get cracking.  Hopefully we can best utilize the skills of our cool high school assistant, Oheni, before he leaves us.  

For the thesis, our first editing group will be Matt, Amina, Foo and Young.  Thanks for going first guys!  The entire team will be editing the thesis at some point, but it was great that these four stepped up.  We're going to need some experts to read over our thesis, so we're going to try to contact some professors we've worked with in the past.  

Since our ice box is really taking shape now, our team is now trying to figure out strategies to integrate a marketing plan in the field.  Towards this end, the team decided to start asking experts the set of questions we formed some time ago.  Also, we're going to try to look for small grants that may help us along the way.  The team is also considering the MTech Entrepreneurship competition for senior year.  

That's all folks, have a great weekend!

~Veena