The Campus Community Partnership Foundation has announced it will award $1,000 to one student who participates in a Computing For Good (C4G) project, every time the C4G course is offered.

The winner of the inaugural C2P-CASE award, presented during the College Awards Ceremony on April 20, is master’s student Ruban Monu (CS) for the Basic Laboratory Information System (BLIS) project, a joint initiative of Georgia Tech, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and participating countries.

The project is intended to create a robust, customizable and easy-to-use system that tracks test samples, results and lab workflow. Such a system would be an effective and sustainable alternative to the manual logs and paper-based approaches used in many developing countries, and to be usable in a region with very little IT infrastructure and limited connectivity. A pilot implementation of BLIS is under way in the west African nation of Cameroon.

"We're tremendously grateful to the Campus Community Partnership Foundation for partnering with us to reward and help develop the most promising projects that emerge from C4G," said Santosh Vempala, Distinguished Professor in the School of Computer Science and one of the driving forces behind C4G. "A little bit of investment can go a long way toward getting projects like BLIS off the ground and serving the populations these projects are designed to help."

The foundation was established to promote the best examples of service learning partnership programs in universities and colleges that benefit the community and the students. The C2P-CASE showcases the best-practice models of collaboration between a university and community.