#TechCares Challenge

Make an Impact on Students Who Impact the World

As the class of 2021 leaves The Hill, we know they’re prepared to join the ranks of alumni who make the world better every day—imagining and designing solutions to problems that matter.

When you make a gift to WPI, you help ensure that, no matter what challenges the world faces next, a new generation of humanist engineers and problem-solvers will be ready to meet them.


Your Impact + $100


Now through June 30, your gift has an outsized impact: our trustees will give $100 for each donor who participates, providing up to $20,000 in total to WPI’s Areas of Greatest Need.


What to Support

No matter what you choose to support, your gift will make a difference for our students and faculty who are making real-world impact every day.


We are especially grateful for your support of our priority areas:

WPI’s Areas of Greatest Need

As we look ahead to a more “normal” fall, your unrestricted support will enable WPI the flexibility to direct funds wherever they are needed most. Your gift will help to fill any gaps in essential funding, whether in student financial aid or in critical operating costs, as we transition to living, learning, and innovating in our next normal.

Financial Aid

While we are all eager to put the pandemic behind us, families across the country are continuing to feel its economic impacts. At a time when the need for thoughtful, well-rounded scientists and engineers has never been more evident, ensuring access to a WPI education for the next generation of STEM leaders is as important as ever. Your gift to financial aid ensures that access.

Emergency Assistance Fund

When students face urgent, unanticipated costs in areas such as food, rent, and medical bills, our generous community, through the Emergency Assistance Fund, helps to meet that need. In the 2020-2021 academic year, 45 students received such support. Your gift to the Emergency Assistance Fund relieves the financial stress on our students, allowing them to focus on what brought them to WPI.

Impacting the World

Just a few of the students, alumni, and faculty making a difference every day.

There will always be problems facing the world, and we as humans have a responsibility to help solve them. That’s why I’ll be seeking an engineering job that allows me to have a direct impact on a community in need.

Brittany Bolster ’21, Mechanical Engineering

       Mia Buccowich ’22, Brian Fay ’22, and Andy Strauss ’23 make up an MQP team that is blending robotics, biomedical engineering, and mechanical engineering to help a University of Houston student regain hope following a devastating car accident.

As part of their Great Problems Seminar (GPS) in fall 2020, Ravyn Rapley ’24, Andrew Sosa ’24, and Bryce Yustick ’24 took on racial segregation and inequality in St. Louis, Mo., working to determine community ways to move the marred racial relationships in St. Louis toward better understanding and more unified efforts to solve mutual problems. Their proposed solution was recognized by the Humanities Education and Research Association (HERA) with an award earlier this year.  

Erin (Bliven) Sizemore ’04, CDC informatics health scientist, and Adam Norige ’03,’04 MS, associate group leader at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, found themselves partnering on emergency response to COVID-19, collaborating to understand how COVID-19 exposure notification technologies can help limit viral transmission while minimizing disruption to daily life.

Leila Carvajal Erker ’96 launched Cocoa Supply in 2003, connecting Ecuador’s cocoa farmers and their ethically sourced cocoa with the world’s finest artisan chocolate makers.

In an entrepreneurship class at WPI, Brendan Gove ’11 got the idea to start a renewable power solutions company.

In 2013, he did just that, founding Zero-Point Development. In 2018, he founded Goventure Capital Group to find cost-effective ways to introduce renewable energy technologies to real estate investments.

“I have been given tools to provide a product that helps humanity, and I feel an obligation to do everything in my power to deliver that product,” he says.

A team of researchers that includes Worcester Polytechnic Institute Biology Professor Pamela Weathers has found that extracts from the leaves of the Artemisia annua plant, a medicinal herb also known as sweet wormwood, inhibit the replication of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and two of its recent variants.

Two research projects out of WPI’s chemical engineering department received funding from NSF’s 2026 Idea Machine competition.

In the first project, Michael Timko, along with Aaron Deskins and Klaus Schmidt-Rohr of Brandeis University, will explore potentially useful applications of nitrogen-rich waste products in areas such as water purification.

The second project, led by Nikolaos Kazantzis and Timko, will explore converting marine plastics into usable fuel for ships collecting plastics from the ocean.

Thanks to an innovation by Haichong Zhang, assistant professor in robotics engineering and biomedical engineering, healthcare workers will be able to perform scans to monitor patients’ lung function without exposing themselves to COVID-19.