Seniors taking professor Gary Osborne’s mechanical engineering class were tasked with designing Capstone Projects and inventing prototypes to present during the end of the year showcase last weekend.

“It is a culmination of everything they learned in their undergraduate curriculum and how to go through and design a project from stage one,” Osborne said.

Local companies and organizations asked students to design products that could solve a company’s problem. For example, the UofL Police Department asked the students to develop a new, less expensive anti-theft bicycle alarm and tracker system. UofL engineering student Elizabeth Cross not only created a working tracker but may have also designed something that could be used beyond bicycles.

“It uses an easy-to-use smartphone application, so anyone with a smartphone can track any of their products whether it be a bike or a backpack or a car,” said Cross.

Check out some of the students’ stories below:

The CTC was established last year to help UofL faculty get their inventions to market.
At the CTC’s April meeting, four UofL research groups presented their ideas and commercialization plans for feedback and advice from more than a dozen local thought leaders.

The UofL faculty are working in the areas of nanotechnology, cybersecurity, data-driven mobile applications and cancer drugs. They pitched their projects and ideas to a CTC group which included investors, serial entrepreneurs, GLI’s Enterprise Corp, Chrysalis Ventures and others who have successfully found funding and launched or sold their ideas.

UofL Speed School of Engineering faculty members and business partners John Naber and Jim Graham were among the presenters.

“It gave us very good feedback along with questions and ideas we had not considered,” Naber said. “One member brought up a potential application of our technology that we had never thought of before.”

Ted Smith, the city of Louisville’s Chief Innovation Officer, is a member of the council.

“These researchers have made some very compelling discoveries and inventions which can become great companies with the diverse industry experience of the council” Smith said.

The council meets twice a year.

Gingles and other speakers have brought UofL researchers a wealth of knowledge on “making good pitches to investors, partners and stakeholders, regulatory reimbursements, protecting intellectual property, marketing and dealing with potential roadblocks” to getting a life science product to market according to Jessica Sharon, program co-organizer.

Gingles, whose company is the largest privately owned medical products manufacturer in the world, told the entrepreneurs the human impact of their invention “will have the most impact on your success, not how much money it might make.”  He offered advice on forming a start-up company versus licensing a technology while adding insight into how Cook Medical decides which inventions to pursue.

A second speaker, Dr. Cedric Francois  of Apellis Pharmaceuticals, told the group that  creating and running a start up company has its challenges but great potential for reward.  Francois is overseeing his second entrepreneurial venture after the first was acquired by a major industry player. His current company  recently raised $47.1 Million.  Francois agreed with Gingles  that team development is paramount to the success of commercialization and that either the licensing or startup path can lead to the same outcome—getting products to market!

UofL is placing an emphasis on getting more faculty to translate and commercialize the inventions they discover at UofL so providing information and identifying resources to make the process easier is a big help to researchers according to Clark.

Radiologist Chin Ng has attended all of the sessions, which he describes as “the training we never got in school”. Ng is developing a novel laser to treat cancer. “I’m a researcher so I know how to write research grant proposals and publish papers” he said. “But these information sessions have taught me I need to stay focused on other things if I hope to get my invention to the marketplace”.

Jill Steinbach-Rankins is a bioengineer who knew that making a pitch to entrepreneurs or investors is outside the norm for an engineer but she’s excited about the opportunity to learn.

The series of seminars includes the name “trifecta” because UofL is the only institution in the country to have received three prestigious translational grants – Coulter Translational Partnership, the NSF I-Corps program and the NIH REACH/UofL ExCITE Award.