UW’s innovation community gathers in new office space
UW Provost Tricia Serrio addresses the CoMotion open house on May 1.
On May 1, CoMotion welcomed 140 people—researchers, mentors, leadership, colleagues, and friends—to its new offices at Condon Hall for an open house, officially kicking off UW’s first-ever Innovation Month.
The event featured remarks by Vice Provost for Innovation François Baneyx, Provost Tricia Serio, and CoMotion-supported physicist Tatiana Khokhlova. In addition, seven UW research teams currently working with CoMotion presented their posters throughout the space.
Both Baneyx and Serio heralded the kickoff of Innovation Month, a campus-wide celebration of the innovation that happens everywhere at UW, involving 65+ events across disciplines, all month long.
“Innovation Month recognizes the commitment of members of our community—students, researchers, postdocs, faculty, and staff across our three campuses—to not only reach great heights in their fields, but to imagine new possibilities and as-yet uncharted paths toward a brighter future for all,” Baneyx wrote in his latest executive communication.
Baneyx also expressed excitement about the new CoMotion headquarters. “In this building, you have innovation that is being promoted, entrepreneurship, new ways of doing things, a new way of thinking in terms of making an impact,” he said in an interview with GeekWire, which covered the event. He highlighted a colorful mural in the new event space and a long hallway decorated with logos from some of the 285 companies that have spun out of UW with support from CoMotion.
Serio lauded the initiative’s theme and messaging, including a logo that features Mount Rainier and the tagline “Imagine new heights.” She said: “Those three words represent everything we do here at the University of Washington.”
Khokhlova works in the Applied Physics Lab with her mother, also a physicist, developing therapeutic ultrasound technology to break up harmful tissue, like kidney stones and tumors. The team works closely with CoMotion to translate their findings from the lab to the clinic. Some of this happens through UW spinoff SonoMotion. Over 10 years, SonoMotion has raised $38M to develop a noninvasive platform to treat kidney stones in a variety of clinical settings, on fully awake patients. It’s now conducting further clinical studies on human subjects and it has reached “breakthrough” status from the US Food and Drug Administration, a designation that enables accelerated regulatory review.
Also present was neuroscientist Eric Szelenyi, a participant in CoMotion’s Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Program. His team, which also participated in the CoMotion Innovators Showcase last fall, is developing a platform to facilitate the development of psychiatric drugs.
“I’m grateful for the invaluable support of CoMotion and its network,” Szelenyi said. “Everyone is very approachable and encouraging and the resources are abundant. It’s very exciting to come out of the academic world and see the larger real-world impact of the work, not just in journals.”
