Fall 2021
This fall, seven teams competing in life sciences and engineering received a full $50,000 award and two teams a $10,000 customer discovery support award. Learn more about them and the vital work they are doing below.

- Tatiana Sadak

- Laura Dorsey

- Emily Ishado
- Soo Borson
- Sarah McKiddy
- Melinda Schultz
- Bill Lober

DPEN is a partnership with the UW School of Nursing that is developing a Dementia Electronic Module (DeM) that contains assessments, decision support, and care tools for dementia, which will accelerate the training of dementia-competent nursing students and support the integration of dementia-specific competencies for nurses across a variety of care settings.

- Gregory Valentine

- Jennifer McCullar

- Krystle Perez
- Elena Bosque
- Sienna Rice

- Adam Arabian
Detect IV’s affordable and accessible peripheral intravenous (IV) infiltration detection skin patch monitors, detects, and alerts when an IV infiltration event occurs in newborns to prevent serious injury and even death.

- Eric Seibel

- Lisa Norton

- Matt Carson
- Cathy Olivo
- Lucas Meza
- Adam Templeton

- Jaron Nix
FlexCut is a new tissue biopsy device utilizing foldout blades capable of precisely sampling tissue from small ducts reducing inconclusive results and unneeded surgeries common with current biopsy devices.

- Christopher Sims

- Roi Eisenkot

- Ming Yao
- Yuli Wang
- Nancy Allbritton

- Gregory Qushair
Piccolo is a novel microfabricated device for measuring the biochemical activity of key lipid pathways in living cells to enable robust, reliable, high-throughput and fully automated screening for developing new therapeutics treating a wide range of diseases including cancers, autoimmune disorders and viral infections.

- Laligam Sekhar

- Jennifer McCullar

- Varadaraya Shenoy
- Ramulu Mamidala
- Garrett Kelly
- Paranjothy Karunaharan

- Brian Bruckner
The Internal Jugular Vein Flow Enhancement Device (IJ-FED) is a medical device to be worn around the neck to non-invasively reduce elevated intracranial pressure and achieve better outcomes in Traumatic Brain Injury patients.

- Alex Gagnon

- Laura Dorsey

- Julian Sachs

- Ben Bierman
OceanCarb is developing technology for massive scale, profitable direct carbon capture utilizing seawater and a unique chemical process for the rapidly growing carbon removal and offset market.

- Sam Golden

- Frieda Chan

- Eric Szelenyi

- Ken Graves
Platea is a biotechnology venture that applies its proprietary cognitive circuit mapping platform to deliver high-content predictions of new psychiatric drug action and efficacy before human testing, thereby greatly reducing the duration and costs incurred during Clinical Trials. Our first-to-market integration of single-cell brain mapping of cognition represents a significant advancement in psychiatric drug development.

- Cody Schlenker

- Forest Bohrer

- Sarah Pristash

- Babu Jain
Apex Solar has developed a novel coating that is applied to solar cells for producing up to 10% more power potential, providing a path to reduce price/Watt and shrink footprint by incurring only 1% production cost increase.

- Dayong Gao

- Forest Bohrer

- Shen Ren
- Ruidong (Miles) Ma
- Ziyuan Wang

- Mary Waiss
SMER is a fully-automated single-mode electromagnetic resonance rewarming system for large-scale cryopreserved biomaterials ranging from sensitive cell suspension used in the next generation of immunotherapies to whole organs for transplantation.