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December 5, 2005 Vol. 77, no. 14F
Researchers in malaria and sensors win top prizes at Berkeley’s Technology Breakthrough CompetitionAt the conclusion of the Berkeley Technology Breakthrough Competition, two engineering teams had out-researched, out-presented, and outsmarted their 41 competitors to take home $15,000 in award money. The second annual competition took place on Thursday, November 17, at the Berkeley Art Museum and was hosted by the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (CET). The competition’s goal is to reward Berkeley engineers and scientists “who are working on high-impact science and technologies that can be applied and widely used within five years.” During the competition, five teams of finalists each gave a six-minute “elevator pitch” and fielded questions from a panel of venture capitalists and IT executives. After a 30-minute break, during which judges deliberated in seclusion and audience members endured the suspense by snacking on elegant appetizers in the lobby, the winners were announced. The Grand Prize and Science Category Award both went to the team of James Kirby, a post-doctoral researcher, and Eric Paradise, a ChemE graduate student, who work in BioE/ChemE professor Jay Keasling’s research group. In their presentation called “The Metabolic Engineering of Yeast,” the two described how they took a metabolic engineering approach to create a strain of baker’s yeast with a vastly improved capacity for isoprenoid production. Isoprenoids are a large group of naturally occurring compounds that include the anti-cancer drug taxol and the anti-malarial artemisinin. The team’s work could potentially reduce the cost of malaria treatment by 90 percent. For it, they received a cash prize of $10,000. “We’re both excited and genuinely surprised given the quality of the other entrants,” says Paradise. The two will continue refining their research. In the Information Technology category, the top prize went to EECS graduate students Josephine Chang, Brian Mattis, and Steve Molesa, and EECS associate professor Vivek Subramanian for “Low-cost Electronic Noses.” The group developed an innovative way to use low-cost printing technology to manufacture electronic noses (gas sensors) at a cost of 10 to 200 times less than currently used technologies, making electronic noses affordable for commercial use. Long-term uses for electronic noses could range from milk cartons that automatically sniff out and detect when their “sell-by” dates have passed to sensors implanted around an airport that sniff out and detect bombs. The team received a cash prize of $5,000. To learn more about CET and the competition, go to http://cet.berkeley.edu/.
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