STEM-In-Action Spring Scoop: Pantry Patrol

Another week, another STEM-In-Action team update! The U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) awards STEM-In-Action Grants of up to $5,000 to eCYBERMISSION teams that wish to further develop and implement their projects in their communities. Typically, only five teams receive a STEM-In-Action grant, but this year ten teams took home the award. This week, team Pantry Patrol are giving us an update on the work their doing combatting food waste and feeding the hungry in their community!

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Hello again! We are team Pantry Patrol, and we would like to update you on our progress with the eCYBERMISSION Stem-In-Action Grant. Our team consists of Abhinav Meduri, Arnav Meduri, and Siddharth Maruvada, 10th graders from William G. Enloe High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. Check out our previous blog post to learn more about how we got started. 

You may have noticed our team has a new domain (https://www.pantrypatrol.org), where we are hosting our website. In the coming months, we hope to revamp the website to include a blog page. Check out the link for periodic updates on our project journey!

Since our last blog post, we have tested Pantry Patrol with NC State’s Feed The Pack food pantry and the Holly Springs Food Cupboard. We have received invaluable feedback from our partners and look forward to improving the customizability of our application as we suit their specific needs. 

From our engagements with food pantries, we have modified our initial deployment model, allowing food pantries to access specific features of the application they deem useful. To improve the accessibility of our application, we have been working on a translation tool to support multiple languages. We are excited for what is in store as we continue engineering our application to support more use cases! As the pandemic subsides, we are hopeful that we will be able to pursue more face-to-face engagements (which are always more fun)!

We were thrilled beyond belief when we got an invitation to visit the North Carolina Governor’s Mansion to meet with the First Lady of North Carolina, Kristin Cooper, and Governor Roy Cooper.  There, we were able to showcase our application and explore food insecurity initiatives across our state. We were even able to tour the mansion and learn about some of the cultural heritage of North Carolina—it was a very memorable experience!

What’s next for Pantry Patrol? We are collaborating with researchers at the University of North Carolina to develop a manuscript to understand the relationship between date-labeling and food waste. We look forward to sharing our passion for the initiative through extensive outreach. We plan on utilizing some of our STEM-in-Action grant money to help incite and promote participation in our data collection processes. 

We want to express our sincere thanks to Dr. Alice Ammernman of the Gillings School of Global Public Health and Kyle R. Busse of the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention for their guidance on our project. We would also like to thank Mr. Gideon Adams of the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina for his continued support. 

Finally, we are ecstatic to share that our team was profiled in the University of North Carolina’s Endeavors Magazine for our progress as part of the STEM-In-Action Grant! Our efforts were also profiled on WRAL News. 

Thank you for reading! 

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The collaborative ethos that Abhinav, Arnav, and Siddharth have kept at the heart of their project is nothing short of inspiring! We love how they are continuing to move forward with such efficiency and maturity, improving their app and incorporating even more science into their engineering through their work with the University of North Carolina. Amazing job, team!

Faith Benner
AEOP Senior Communications and Marketing Specialist