esmansf

Assuming that she was competing for the Intel Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), as a former judge, I can say that her project has a major red flag. One of the disqualification criteria applied to projects is to examine if an Institutional Review Board (IRB) properly vetted her project and approved experimention on human subjects. From my perspective, if her paperwork was anything less than pristine, signed, and notarized, I could not imagine a judging committee electing it to first place.

I did my MS thesis work on 3D printing at the single micron scale. There are some very cool applications for the technology, but I do not know what I would do with it outside of prototyping or using it to make molds for casting parts.

I'm a lot more bullish about technologies that print metal such as NASA Langely's EBF3 (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/ebf3.html) than soft, anisotropic polymers.

Don't forget the author's own confirmation bias; the author is in an industry that relies on unpaid internships, and probably has many friends, who are also in unpaid internships in related fields (i.e. fashion, non-profit, etc).