Senior Design Team takes home the 2025 Lowell Award for Interdisciplinary Solutions in Mining — and $1,500 with it!

Senior design teammates: Kate Hartke, Jessica Mazza, Xavia Gutierrez, & Macy Winn

Official design poster presented by the senior design team at the 2025 Craig M. Berge Design Day

Taking It Home: A Year of Grit, Fungus, and a Giant Check

It was late August 2024 when environmental engineering classmates Kate Hartke, Jessica Mazza, Xavia Gutierrez, and Macy Winn officially kicked off their senior design journey. Calling themselves the Sustainability Sisters, they locked in their first-choice project: Heavy Metals Remediation Using Fungi. What started as an exciting concept quickly hit a roadblock … the team had no lab to perform the experiments essential to their design. Who was going to teach them how to grow fungi , expose it to toxic heavy metals, and use intricate instruments to analyze the data?

Luckily, Macy and Xavia had just chosen Dr. Cherie De Vore as their accelerated master’s advisor and mentor. They reached out with fingers crossed, and she enthusiastically agreed to sponsor the project. From there, the team spent the fall learning about the composition of acid mine drainage, the procedure of fungal culturing & designing practical lab setups from scratch.

Through late night meetings, long lab hours, and a lot of trial and error, the team pushed through a challenging but rewarding year. By late April, data was processed, results were analyzed, and the project was finally complete. It was nearing the end of the 2025 Craig M. Berge Design Day…and then came the surprise:

“Team 25064, Heavy Metals Remediation Using Fungi!”

The group was shocked to win the Lowell Award for Interdisciplinary Solutions in Mining, along with a $1,500 prize. It was the proudest moment of the year, made sweeter by how far they'd come. Huge thanks to Dr. De Vore for her mentorship, encouragement, and unwavering belief in the team.