MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation Awards $669,000 in Grants to Faculty Research Projects

    CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- The Massachusetts Institute of
 Technology (MIT) Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation today announced
 it issued eight grants -- five new projects and three renewals -- totaling
 $669,000 from a pool of 34 applicants in its fall round of proposals.  The
 grants, awarded to MIT faculty in the School of Engineering, will fund
 development of innovations ranging from a new method of early cancer detection
 to a breakthrough in the cost of manufacturing fuel cells.
     In only two years since it was launched with the mission to bridge the gap
 between laboratory research at MIT and the marketplace, the Deshpande Center
 has funded 38 projects, with two of the first four Innovation Grant recipients
 spun out as new, venture-capital-backed companies and another project licensed
 for commercial use.  The Center helps researchers bring their ideas to
 fruition by supporting market-driven innovation, assisting with the
 intellectual property process, and enabling collaboration throughout the R&D
 phase. Additionally, a Deshpande Center Catalyst program facilitates market
 input from a network of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists recruited by the
 Center to help advance the innovations to commercialization.
     The early Deshpande grant winners that benefited from such transitional
 support and subsequently launched new commercial ventures are Brontes
 Technologies, a 3-D imaging company in Woburn, MA, and Pervasis Therapeutics,
 a medical device technology company in Cambridge, MA.  Another Deshpande
 team's memory cell technology was licensed to a nanotechnology company.
 Several other start-ups are in the works; one of them, recently incorporated
 as Myomo, won the grand prize in the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition in
 2004.
 
     The grant winners are:
 
     -- Lionel Kimerling and Anuradha Murthy Agarwal: Low-cost multispectral
        infrared detector arrays
 
     -- John Brisson: Novel ice-cream production method
 
     -- Chiping Chen: Making 3G and 4G a reality with low-cost amplifiers for
        wireless base stations
 
     -- Clark Colton: Finding early-stage cancers using novel contrast agents
        for enhanced MRI
 
     -- Martin Culpepper: HexFlex: Enabling nanofabrication with a six-axis
        nanomanipulator
 
     -- Klavs Jensen: Accelerating innovation in the chemistry lab with
        integrated automated microchemical systems
 
     -- Yang Shao-Horn: Engineered electrode assemblies for PEM fuel cells
 
     -- Michael Stonebraker: Hybrid DBMS optimized for read-intensive
        applications
 
     For additional information on these grants or the Deshpande Center in
 general, please visit http://web.mit.edu/deshpandecenter
 
     About the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation
     The Deshpande Center is part of the MIT School of Engineering and was
 established in 2002 through an initial $20M gift from Jaishree Deshpande and
 Desh Deshpande, the co-founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks. The
 Deshpande Center supports a wide range of emerging technologies and serves as
 a catalyst for innovation and entrepreneurship by supporting leading-edge
 research and bridging the gap between the laboratory and the marketplace.
 
      Krisztina Holly
      Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation
      617-253-0943
      zholly@mit.edu
      http://web.mit.edu/deshpandecenter
 
 

SOURCE  MIT