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.