Since the day two Wichita Eagle reporters visited Christina Long’s middle school class, she knew what she envisioned for her own future. For the Wichita, Kansas, native, an invitation to tour the newspaper’s bustling newsroom only cemented it. “Seeing all the activity between reporters, listening to the police scanner, all of the busyness — I knew that’s where I wanted to be,” said Christina, now president and CEO of Create Campaign, an organization that brings guidance, support and resources to entrepreneurs in Wichita’s underserved minority communities.
There’s not much that Flint Hills Resources’ Mike Clausewitz and Deb Preschler don’t know about safely refining oil and producing petrochemicals. Deb, an operations innovation director, and Mike, an enterprise leak detection and repair (LDAR) execution lead, have together clocked up nearly 60 years at Flint Hills’ Corpus Christi East and West, two of the three Flint Hills Resources refineries that separate oil into jet fuel, low-sulfur gasoline, diesel and the petrochemicals used to manufacture clothing, carpet, tires and much more.
This year’s Invention Convention U.S. Nationals may have taken a new format due to COVID-19, but that didn’t deter hundreds of students representing schools across the country from submitting their ideas and pitches for this year’s fully remote competition. From this deep pool of inventive thinking, two students were selected as 2020 Koch Young Visioneers – a special award sponsored by Koch Industries recognizing student innovators whose ideas stand to benefit society.