UCD undergrad students Kelly Hutmacher and Morgan Rease joined up with graduate students Maha Alshehab and Stephen Young (who also captained the team) to compete nationally at the IFT national meeting's student competition. 

This year 8 teams progressed to the finals. The competition was a double elimination, meaning that a team must lose twice before they're out of the competition. The UCD team lost the first match; won the second and third matches; then lost the last match, which meant they did not progress to the finals to compete against Ohio State. 

Student teams were asked questions based on 20 different broad categories of food science including biotechnology, engineering, IFT knowledge, and more. The UC Davis' team divided up the 20 categories among the 4 participating members to have every aspect covered. 

Ohio State beat UCD to progress to the final matches; but the team took comfort in that they had two UCD alumni/seasoned College Bowl players, John Frelka and David Phinney, competing on the OS team during that round. North Carolina State ended up trumping Ohio State in the end. 

Congratulations to our students for making it so far!