Innovation Celebration Luncheon Puts Focus on Texas Tech Innovation

May 13, 2015

The university brings together innovators, investors and regional
economic development partners to celebrate and promote
entrepreneurial opportunities.

Texas Tech University's Office of Research Commercialization hosted the Innovation Celebration Luncheon May 13 to honor local innovators from Texas Tech University and Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.

The luncheon also provided an opportunity for the honorees to connect with people who could possibly help take their innovations to market.

Robert V. Duncan, senior vice president for research at Texas Tech University, and Michael Conn, senior vice president for research and associate provost for the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, recognized innovators from their respective universities.

Five Texas Tech faculty members have received U.S. patents since 2010:

• Waylon House, director of MRI-PAC, petroleum engineering
• Donald Lie, Keh-Shew Lu Regents Chair in electrical & computer engineering
• Uzi Mann, professor, chemical engineering
• J. Nelson Rushton, associate professor, computer science
• Robert Shaw, associate professor, chemistry & biochemistry

At least 11 inventors have licensed technologies to for-profit companies since Sept. 1, 2013:

• Karen Fritz – Occupational Health & Safety Solutions LLC
• Mohamed Soliman – Haliburton Energy Services
• Michelle Pantoya – AVF Nano Alloys LLC
• Seshadri Ramkumar – General Service and Supply
• John Schroeder, Jerry Guynes, Brian Hirth – SmartWind Technologies LLC
• Zhixin Xie – Bayer CropScience
• John Schroeder – WeatherFlow Inc.
• Siva Vanapalli – NeoFluidics LLC
• Ming-Hai Wang – Becton Dickinson & Company
• Maurizio Chiriva-Internati – Kiromic LLC

More than 100 university faculty members disclosed inventions during that same time period, 65 from Texas Tech and 36 from the Health Sciences Center.

Rathindra "Babu" DasGupta, lead program director for the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, gave a keynote address focusing on ways inventors can take their ideas from lab to marketplace.