Meet the winners of the Shane Chidgzey Award from Semester 1 2026
We're excited to celebrate the Semester 1 recipients of the 2026 Shane Chidgzey Award, recognising student founders who have demonstrated curiosity, initiative and the willingness to take that important first step.
Every semester, Curiosity provides a reminder of what's possible when students are given the space to explore an idea. Students enter the program with little more than a question, a frustration they've noticed, or a concept they've been thinking about for months. Over 7 weeks, they test assumptions, speak with potential customers, build confidence, and begin turning early ideas into solutions with real-world potential.
In Semester 1 2026, participants explored challenges across agriculture, sustainability, and food innovation. Different industries, different technologies, but all driven by the same mindset: identifying meaningful problems and taking the first steps towards solving them.
We're pleased to celebrate the Semester One recipients of the 2026 Shane Chidgzey Award, recognising student founders who have demonstrated curiosity, initiative and the willingness to take that important first step.
Congratulations to our winners:
- AVAFlow (Athava Repal, Vidun Periyapperuma and Yuanlang Chen)
- ChitoWrap (Lakshman Shankar)
- Blueca (Harshitha Venu Gopal)
Each team will receive seed funding to help continue developing their ideas beyond Curiosity and take their next steps as founders.
AVAFlow
Smarter water monitoring for agriculture
(Athava Repal, Vidun Periyapperuma and Yuanlang Chen)
When Athava, Vidun and Yuan began speaking with people across the agriculture sector, they kept hearing the same challenge.
Many farms rely on water flowmeters that require batteries, solar panels or external power. Across large and remote properties, maintaining these systems can be difficult, and when equipment fails, leaks or blockages may go unnoticed until they become costly problems.
Their solution is a self-powered smart flowmeter that generates its own energy from the movement of water through the pipe. By removing the need for external power sources, the team aims to create a monitoring system that is more reliable, requires less maintenance and is better suited to remote environments.
The Shane Chidgzey Award will support the team to manufacture and test their first prototype in UQ's water laboratories, helping them continue validating the technology and preparing for future customer testing.
ChitoWrap
Turning seafood waster into sustainable packaging
(Lakshman Shankar)
Sometimes great ideas come from looking at waste differently. Lakshman noticed that thousands of tonnes of seafood shells are discarded every year across Australia, while businesses are simultaneously searching for more sustainable alternatives to plastic packaging.
ChitoWrap transforms discarded crustacean shells into biodegradable packaging materials, creating value from a resource that would otherwise become waste. It's a solution that has the potential to support seafood processors, food manufacturers and retailers while contributing to a more circular economy.
The award funding will help Lakshman continue product development, purchase raw materials, and carry out early testing to better understand the material's commercial potential.
Blueca
Bringing colour and nutrition together
(Harshitha Venu Gopal)
Blueca began with curiosity in the lab. While working with C-phycocyanin, a natural blue pigment extracted from spirulina, Harshitha started asking a simple question:
What if food colouring could do more than simply make food look appealing?
That question became Blueca, an idea exploring functional food products that combine natural colour with nutritional benefits. From gummies to beverages and healthy snacks, the vision is to replace synthetic food colourings with a natural ingredient that also offers antioxidant properties, helping create products that are both visually appealing and better aligned with growing consumer demand for clean-label foods.
The Shane Chidgzey Award will support further prototype development, ingredient sourcing and market research as Blueca continues its journey from university research towards commercialisation.
More than an award
One of the most rewarding aspects of Curiosity is seeing students realise they don't need to have all the answers before they begin.
Entrepreneurship isn't about having the perfect idea. It's about being curious enough to ask better questions, brave enough to test assumptions, and resilient enough to keep learning along the way. The Shane Chidgzey Award celebrates exactly that spirit.
Congratulations to Athava, Vidun, Yuan, Lakshman and Harshitha. We're incredibly proud of what you've achieved so far and excited to see where your entrepreneurial journeys take you next.
While Curiosity may be coming to an end for this cohort, it's only the beginning of what these founders will go on to build.
Applications for Curiosity Semester 2 are open now.
Meet the Shane Award winners and their projects! Find your path with Ventures - spots are limited.