Deveer, Hodgins and Burke win 2025 IDEA award
Members of ACEP Cyberpod team, from left to right, Petie Deveer, Adrian Burke and Hailey Hodgins pose for a photo. The team received a 2025 Innovative Disclosures and Entrepreneurial Activities award for their PULSEtastic project. The þƵ station sensors Deveer and Hodgins are holding were used for their research project.
February 26, 2026
By Yuri Bult-Ito
A team of students at ACEP, known as “Cyberpod,” has received a 2025 Innovative Disclosures and Entrepreneurial Activities, or IDEA, award.
Since 2015, the IDEA awards, presented by the þƵ Office of Intellectual Property and Commercialization, have honored faculty, staff and students at UA Fairbanks and UA Southeast for turning university research into real-world solutions.
Cyberpod members Petie Deveer, Hailey Hodgins and Adrian Burke won the IDEA Nanook Award for the best undergraduate invention disclosure for their tool “PULSEtastic.”
PULSEtastic allows programmers to easily connect a computer to a Meshtastic network via a wired connection. The tool encrypts data from the computer and sends it as messages over the Meshtastic network, enabling communication in remote areas without cell service. It also breaks large data files into smaller chunks if necessary. Additionally, PULSEtastic integrates seamlessly with Node-RED, a visual programming tool, making it simple for users to automate tasks and display data on dashboards.
This tool was developed as part of Deveer and Hodgins’ project, “Powering and Unifying Long-range Sensor Ecosystems,” or PULSE, and Burke’s project, “Sensor technology for Alaska Rural Communities Targeting Remote Atmospheric Monitoring,” or STARTRAM. Both projects received a UAF Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Activity award.
Hailey Hodgins leads a workshop activity on how to use PULSEtastic to send radio messages between computers.
Dayne Broderson, the team’s mentor, praised their approach, from learning new technologies to sharing their findings.
He highlighted the project’s impact. “Their work helped ACEP by testing and evaluating technologies we currently use or were considering,” he said.
“They also created a proof-of-concept, which has deepened our understanding of how these technologies can support research and STEM education within the T3 Alaska network,” he added.
The team has been invited to speak at the Center for Innovation’s Arctic Velocity event in Fairbanks on March 6, where they will present a talk about their project and receive the award.
Check out the Cyberpod’s projects:
- PULSEtastic:
- PULSE/STARTRAM: