Sometimes the best ideas come from working somewhere no one else is. That certainly was the case for the team judged the best overall project at the Spring 2025 Capstone Design Expo April 22.

Their quick-to-adjust surgical retractor is designed to more easily pull back skin and tissue during head and neck surgeries to allow doctors to access deeper muscles, organs, and other tissues. Current devices require surgical assistants to hold them for hours or the use of cumbersome stands, and they require significant effort to adjust.

Yet no one seemed to be innovating in the area until Emory Healthcare ear, nose, and throat surgeon David Chou brought the idea to the team to come up with something better.

“What really makes this project so interesting is its focus on not just safety and efficiency, but on innovation as a whole, and innovating in an area no one was thinking about,” said Stefano Poma, one the members of Team RapidReach. “Our sponsor had this vision of a better option with faster adjustment times. And that really is where our idea came in. It was a lot of overturning the current designs and coming up with a whole new idea from scratch.”

The concourses of Georgia Tech’s McCamish Pavilion were full of other new ideas during this spring’s Expo. A record 238 teams of more than 1,300 students showed off their semester-long projects that serve as a culmination of their undergraduate studies.

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