Winner: Dan Turk, BWK New York
Dan Turk has made an unusually large splash during a few short months in PR. BWK NY President Ben Kellogg says Turk jumped in with both feet when he started a part-time internship in January, squeezing in hours at the agency between his studies as a dual major at Yeshiva University, where he’s a junior. He worked at the agency full time during the summer. He played a key role in scoring 200-plus media placements in July for the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT when it launched “4-D printing”—a method of creating components that modify themselves over time in response to changing conditions.
Turk also secured more than 15 placements for “RoboRoach,” a Kickstarter campaign to create the first commercially available cyborg, a cockroach that can be controlled via a smartphone and used to study how the brain responds to sensory stimuli. Not only did the campaign achieve high-profile coverage in Wired and Fast Company, but RoboRoach received 23% more funding than it had sought on Kickstarter, and later won the White House’s Citizen Scientist Champions of Change Award.
BWKNY has already offered Turk a full-time position when he graduates in May 2015.
Honorable Mentions:
- Nicole Shimer, Havas
- Malena Silva, Waggener Edstrom