On September 9, a handful of Berkeley Lab scientists participated in an annual pitch competition hosted by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), making their business cases for their inventions in front of a panel of judges.
The winners of the pitch competition are:
- First Place: Lukas Hackl (ETA) for “Aepnus Technology, an Electrochemical Platform Technology for the Refinement of Battery Minerals”
- Second Place: Bishoy Kamel (JGI) for “Rapid Development of COVID Precise Diagnostics”
- Third Place (tied):
- Nick Buraglio (ESnet) for “Hecate: Directing happiness to internet service provider customer” (artificial intelligence/machine learning-driven traffic engineering for high profile networks
- Peter Grant (ETA) for “SmartRecirc—Near Zero Waste Hot Water Distribution”
Prizes included funding for winners to continue their lab-to-market journey. Lukas won a prize of $5,000 to conduct customer discovery, Bishoy won a prize of $2,500, and Nick and Peter each received $1,000. Lukas will also represent Berkeley Lab in a DOE-wide pitch competition.
The judging panel included:
- Jeremy Greeter, Senior Technology Commercialization Associate, IPO
- Robin Johnston, Biosciences Strategic Industry Engagements and Entrepreneurship Lead, JBEI
- Shanshan Li, Senior Technology Commercialization Associate, IPO
- Reshma Singh, Program Director of IMPEL+, ETA
- Rachel Slaybaugh, Division Director, Cyclotron Road, ETA