Read the full press release from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation here.
$100K fund to accelerate solutions being developed by UW–Madison researchers
MADISON, Wis. – The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation announced that
nine highly deployable projects have been selected to receive
development funding through the UW/WARF COVID-19 Accelerator Challenge.
From improved respirators to accelerated testing, these innovations are
designed to be rapidly advanced over the coming months to combat the
pandemic.
WARF received dozens of submissions from PIs and their teams across a
wide range of affiliations, including the State Lab of Hygiene, UW
Makerspace, statistics, design studies and engineering.
The selected projects are led by the following PIs:
- Azam Ahmed (neurological surgery) and Terrence Oakes (radiology) for safe and sanitizable technologies to help prevent virus spread in a hospital setting
- Kayley Janssen (Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene) for surveillance of the virus in wastewaters
- Tim Osswald (mechanical engineering) for mass production of cleanable and reusable respirators
- Kalpana Raja and Ron Stewart (Morgridge Institute for Research) for a drug repurposing discovery system
- Joshua Medow (biomedical engineering) for a digital assistance system for medical staff
- Lennon Rodgers (UW Makerspace) for a compact air-purifying respirator
- David O’Connor (pathology and laboratory medicine), Thomas Friedrich (pathobiological sciences) and David Beebe (biomedical engineering) for accelerated COVID-19 testing
- Nathan Sherer (oncology) for an assay to identify virus inhibitors
- Brian Yandell (statistics) for a method to track and visualize the outbreak in counties with small populations
“We are grateful to WARF for offering this opportunity to
UW–Madison and Morgridge Institute for Research researchers, from
faculty to staff and students,” says Steve Ackerman, UW–Madison vice
chancellor for research and graduate education. “These grants are
critical to helping our research community more quickly advance
commercially promising technologies closer to the marketplace in
response to COVID-19 impacts. It’s partnerships such as this one with
WARF that allows us to tackle the immediate and ongoing challenges that
this pandemic presents.”
“When WARF announced this initiative back in April we did not know what
kind of response we would receive given the many challenges – personal
and scientific – our research community faces at this time,” says Erik
Iverson, chief executive officer of WARF. “The response was
overwhelming. We are grateful, humbled, and excited to see how these
innovations advance over the coming months to help our world respond and
recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Projects not selected for funding through the UW/WARF COVID-19 Challenge
may still be connected to other supportive resources within WARF.
WARF remains open for business during the COVID-19 circumstance and
continues to welcome invention disclosures from UW–Madison faculty,
staff and students.