Four Ohio Northern University students have been selected as University Innovation Fellows (UIF) by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. The students, who are enrolled in the T.J. Smull College of Engineering, are Anne Major of Okemos, Mich.; Brittney Masters of Millersburg, Ohio; Todd Federici of Findlay, Ohio; and Will Sierzputowski of Columbus, Ohio.

The University Innovation Fellows program is designed to encourage student leaders to increase campus engagement with innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity and design thinking. Students underwent six weeks of online training in fall 2018 and traveled to the University Innovation Fellows Silicon Valley meetup in March, during which they traveled to Stanford design school and Google.

The goal is to ensure that all students gain the necessary attitudes, skills and knowledge required to compete in the economy of the future.

Students who are selected for this program are sponsored by faculty and administrators and are selected through an annual application process. With the addition of the new fellows, the program has trained more than 1,800 students from 258 institutions since its creation.

The ONU students were able to complete training and attend the meetup thanks to the support of the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network and the Kern Family Foundation.

As a University Innovation Fellow, the students become equipped to create new opportunities to help peers develop an entrepreneurial mindset, including innovation spaces, entrepreneurship events, design-thinking workshops, multi-school collaborations or national partnerships. Ohio Northern University continues to serve the same values of collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship in support of UIF students through programs such as the KEEN Innovation challenge, the Polar Pitch Competition and the entrepreneurship program, which are all funded by the KEEN network.