Nancy Kamei (far right) provides feedback after a pitch as Peter Fiske (left) and Jill Fujisaki (center) listen.

On Friday, Nov. 3, Berkeley Lab researcher-entrepreneurs made their business cases in front of an expert panel at LBNL’s Inaugural Pitch Competition, hosted by Berkeley Lab’s Innovation and Partnerships Office.

 

 

 

The winners are —

 

 1st Place: Miniature Ion Accelerator
Thomas Schenkel (presenter), Arun Persaud, Peter Seidl, and Qing Ji
Accelerator Technologies and Applied Physics

 

2nd Place: Gamma Ray Detector
Erika Suzuki (presenter), Kai Vetter and Andrew Haefner
Nuclear Science

 

3rd Place: Interface Characterization
Isvar Cordova, Energy Sciences / Advanced Light Source

 

 

People’s Choice Award: SAFR: Scalable and Affordable Fluoride Removal
Andrew Haddad, ETA

 

 

 

All teams honed their entrepreneurial skills in I-Corps and DOE Energy I-Corps training, yielding a strong slate of contestants from across Berkeley Lab including

  • Green Building Designs and Technologies
    Spencer Dutton (Energy Technologies Area – Energy Analysis and Environmental Impacts)
  • Chelator for Heavy Metal Toxicity
    Rebecca Abergel, Gauthier DeBlonde, and Dahlia An (Energy Sciences – Chemical Sciences)
  • Next Generation Thermoset Plastics
    Brett Helms, Pete Christensen (Energy Sciences – Molecular Foundry)
  • Ring Burner
    Peter Therkelsen, Mike Tucker (ETA – Building Technologies and Urban Systems & Energy Storage and Distributed Resources)
  • TOUGH Software for Modeling Multiphase Flow
    Yingqi Zhang and Nic Spycher (Earth and Environmental Sciences – Energy Geosciences)

Prizes included funding for winners to continue their lab-to-market journey and a chance to represent Berkeley Lab in a DOE-wide pitch competition.  Judges selected the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners. Event attendees voted for the People’s Choice Award winner.

A Special Thanks to the Expert Panel of Judges:

Peter Fiske – Director, Water-Energy Resilience Research Institute, LBNL
Jill Fujisaki – Researcher Administrator, UC Berkeley
Nancy Kamei – Partner, Global Health at Aberdare Ventures
Elsie Quaite-Randall – Chief Technology Transfer Officer, LBNL
Gregory Scharfstein – Mechanical Engineer, LBNL, and two-time Energy I-Corps participant

Interested in a future pitch event and entrepreneurial training? Contact Russell Carrington, KRCarrington@lbl.gov.