Each year OSTA presents cash awards to deserving student researchers at the annual Oklahoma State Science Fair in Ada. Those awards are funded entirely through proceeds raise in the annual silent auction at the OSTA Fall Conference. OSTA members donate items of value (this isn’t a garage sale), and conference participants can place their bids on the items throughout the day of the conference. There are a lot of varied items up for bid, like a new Misfit Shine, donated by company founder and CEO Sonny Vu.
The Shine is a small, waterproof activity tracker that displays it’s data through an iPhone or Android Phone app. You may recall the recent Apple iPhone ad that featured the Shine and other activity trackers in action to the Tune of “Chicken Fat”, the exercise-inspiring song by actor Robert Preston that was distributed to schools across the country through President Kennedy’s efforts to increase physical fitness of the nation’s youth. (That may be a obtuse historical aside for most of you, but I well recall my efforts to keep up with the demands of this song while a 6th grader in 1962, especially the day when our teacher accidently(?) set the 33 1/3 RPM record to play at 45 RPM).
But what makes this donation special is that Sonny is an Oklahoman 
AND an alumnus of the Oklahoma State Science Fair! A graduate of Putnam City West High School, Sonny graduated from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with a degree in mathematics and pursued a PhD in linguistics at MIT studying under Noam Chomsky. After working for a time at Microsoft, he founded the software company FireSpout, which was eventually purchased by a large search engine company. He then, with his old college roommate, Sridhar Iyengar, started AgaMatrix, a company that invents, manufactures, and markets a number of blood glucose monitoring and diabetes management products. That company has developed and sold millions of glucose monitoring devices and features digital signal processing technology that drastically dampens common signal distortions in signals to the meter and uploads data to a mobile device. After securing a partnership between AgaMatrix and Sanofi-aventis, one of Europe’s largest pharmaceutical companies, he left to found Misfit Wearables in an effort to capture a portion of the multi-billion dollar wearables device market.
Sonny is one of the thousands of Oklahoma youngsters who have been a part of science education and the many “value added” science programs (like Science Fair, Science Olympiad, BotBall, Science Quest, Engineering Fair, etc.) that we have in Oklahoma. Your participation in the OSTA Silent Auction is yet another way you pay it forward to the future of these remarkable students. Bring your checkbook and/or your credit card (we have a card reader). Yes, you’ll be able to find a bargain, but this isn’t about you or OSTA. It’s about the Sonny Vu’s that we teach and mentor and the next generation of Oklahoma scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who work too make the world a better place.