The final of the 2024/2025 Faculty of Natural Sciences Make-A-Difference competition takes place on Wednesday 22 October 2025. Ahead of this, we hear from the finalists about their projects.
“We knew it would happen again.” That was the certainty Arda Kancal and his teammates brought with them from Istanbul, Turkey. The 2023 earthquake that devastated their country was not the first, and, according to seismologists, almost certainly not the last. With a 60% chance of a similarly catastrophic quake hitting Istanbul by 2030, the team behind D-View entered Imperial College London’s Faculty of Natural Sciences Make-A-Difference (FoNS-MAD) competition determined to build something life-saving.
Their project, an autonomous drone system that uses low-cost geophone sensors to locate trapped earthquake survivors, was born not only out of a sense of academic curiosity but also necessity. “We watched as people in our hometowns waited for rescue that never came,” Arda said. “We knew we had to do something. Something cheap enough for governments to actually use, something deployable, not just theoretical.”