The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), coordinator of the U.S. voluntary standardization system, and its Committee on Education (CoE) have named the winners of the 2026 Student Paper Competition. In the college category, Andrew Cagliostro of the University of Delaware won first place, and Monisha Afrooz of the University at Buffalo won second place. In the high school category, Aryash Shyam of Lehigh Valley Academy RCS won first place, and Sania Batool of Mount Vernon High School won second place.
The annual competition is part of ANSI's ongoing effort to build awareness of standards and conformance among the students who will one day help develop and apply them.
Participants were asked to explore how technical standards quietly support everyday life—from smartphone compatibility to food safety—and to imagine what would happen without them.
Cagliostro’s winning college paper, “One Man's Trash, Society's Treasure: The Importance of Engineering Standards in Waste Management,” blends personal essay with research about the hidden system of standards that make waste management work, framed through the author’s summer working at a waste management facility with his uncle.
Afrooz’s second-place college paper, “The Standards We Never See: How Medical Device Standards Protect Patients Around the World,” examines how they function as one of the most underappreciated forms of public health protection today, drawing on the author’s experiences across three countries and training in epidemiology.
Shyam’s winning high school paper, “Designing Out Error: How ISO 80369 Turned a Deadly Universal Connector into a Life-Saving Standard,” draws on the writer’s experience as a surgical patient at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to explore the ANSI/AAMI/ISO 80369 connector standard, which redesigns medical tubing connectors so that incompatible systems—like IV lines and feeding tubes—cannot be physically joined.
Batool’s second-place high school paper, “Invisible Standards in Modern Technology: How USB and Wi-Fi Keep the World Connected,” examines how behind-the-scenes standards enable everyday connectivity by ensuring compatibility between devices from different manufacturers.
Each winner will receive a cash prize.
ANSI will announce details about the 2027 Student Paper Competition soon. For more information about the competition or the ANSI Committee on Education, please contact Lisa Rajchel ([email protected]).
