Princeton University held its 8th Annual Innovation Forum on campus on March 12th to celebrate their students who are doing innovative research. Graduate students were given an opportunity to present their work to a panel of judges who assessed the prospects for commercialization. The panel was comprised of accomplished entrepreneurs, business leaders and academic researchers. A champagne toast was raised at the end of the competition to acknowledge all of the participants and celebrate innovation.
Attendees had an opportunity to review posters of each student’s innovative work and spend one on one time with them while the judges deliberated. One of the students, Nicolas Pegard a 4th year graduate student developing a method of flow-based tomography, shared his thoughts about participating in the competition of the Forum and why it was helpful to his research. “For researchers, an achievement usually means publishing or filing for patent. The procedure is usually always the same : we make a leaf to the tree of knowledge, and create something new based on what existed before. At the innovation forum, we drop the tree, and stay aside from the technical background we would always rely on. Instead, we observe our works from a new perspective: commercial applications. We have 3 minutes to answer two questions: “Who would buy what I’ve just made?” and “How much money are we talking about ?”. Though my talk didn’t impress the jury as much as I hoped, this pitch was a wonderful experience. We talk to a different audience, send a different message about our research, and get to meet industrial partners and investors afterwards at the poster session who ask very precise questions. It’s a lot of work to prepare for the event, but it’s worth it.”
The first place winner was “Fingerprinting the Air for Health and Climate High Performance, Portable Gas Sensors” that was presented by Lei Tao (photo left), a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The hand held battery operated sensor measures air pollutants and greenhouse gases, and is lighter, smaller and uses less power than current products. Second place went to “Computational Discovery of Cost-effective Materials for Carbon Capture and Other Molecular Separations” presented by Eric First (center), a fourth year Ph.d student in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. Third place was awarded to “High Performance II-VI Infrared Detectors” presented by Arvind Ravikumar (right), a third year graduate student in Electrical Engineering.
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Photo Courtesy of: FrankWojciechoswkPhotography
