Announcing the 2019 Ignition Award Winners
Technology Development is pleased to announce the winners of the 2019 Ignition Award. The Ignition program awards $75K, one-year grants to Boston University faculty to help launch promising new technologies into the marketplace. Congratulations to this year’s winners, listed below.
Members of the BU research community can reach out to Rana K. Gupta, Director, Faculty Entrepreneurship, with questions or to learn more about the Ignition program.
| Victoria Bolotina | Medicine, Physiology and Biophysics (BUSM) | Gene therapy to stop or delay progression of Parkinson’s Disease |
| Steve Borkan | Medicine (BUSM) | Treatment of acute kidney injury using novel peptides |
| Lauren Brown | Chemistry (CAS) | Novel derivatives of an anticancer drug to treat malaria, a parasite disease that infects more than 200 million people each year |
| Ji-Xin Cheng | Biomedical Engineering (ENG) | A miniature wireless thermo-acoustic guide and augmented reality system for precise breast conserving surgery at sub-millimeter accuracy |
| Malay Mazumder | Electrical & Computer Engineering (ENG) | An instrument to minimize energy-yield losses caused by dust deposition on solar installations |
| Ayca Yalcin Ozkumur | Electrical & Computer Engineering (ENG) | An image-based biosensor for rapid, ultrasensitive detection and phenotypical characterization of pathogenic bacteria for sepsis diagnosis and management |
| Roberto Paiella | Electrical & Computer Engineering (ENG) | A new camera technology featuring extreme size miniaturization inspired by the compound-eye vision modality found in insects and crustaceans to address a wide range of emerging imaging applications including machine vision (e.g., for autonomous drone navigation), surveillance, endoscopic medical imaging, manufacturing quality control, and ophthalmology |
| Selim Unlu | Electrical & Computer Engineering (ENG) | An optical sensing technology capable of multiplexed, label-free kinetic measurements that can be used to determine molecular binding affinities for proteins, nucleic acids, and other small molecules; adoption in academic and commercial labs could yield new diagnostics, better drug and antibody development, and new biological assays |
| Lawrence Ziegler | Chemistry (CAS) | An optically-based methodology for rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing, providing better clinical treatment and improving outcomes for bacterial infections in humans |