2007–2008 highlights
EVERY SEMESTER of their education, nearly 150 UW-Madison biomedical engineering undergraduate students work in teams to design meaningful solutions to real-world clinical problems posed by clients in medicine, academia and industry. In less than a decade, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation—the UW-Madison patenting and licensing arm—has received 41 disclosures based on these inventions.
Electrical engineering alumnus Peter Tong (MS ’65) and the Tong Family Foundation sponsor the Tong Biomedical Engineering Design Awards each May to honor the best sophomore, junior and senior design. A panel of judges also selects projects for additional support.
In 2008, the committee chose senior Tim Pearce’s project, “A soluble factor gradient generator,” and senior Matt Kudek’s project, “A leg positioner/pannus retractor,” for funding that supports further development of the designs and intellectual property in collaboration with a biomedical engineering faculty member.
- Message from the dean
- Research funding and invention disclosures
- Research advances
- Faculty honors
- Student innovation
- Student honors and educational advances
Student innovation
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Designed by (from left Jon Sass, Ben Schoepke, Dave Schurter, Marty Grasse and Arin Ellingson, a catheterized system to sense bladder pressure and control urine flow to prevent incontinence won the 10,000 top prize in the Schoofs Prize for Creativity during the 2008 Innovation Days competition. Kyle Hanson won first place and $2,500 in the Tong Prototype Prize for his invention, the Portable Refrigerated Beverage Dispenser, a lightweight, self-contained unit for transporting, cooling and dispensing a keg.
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A company formed by mechanical engineering students Chris Meyer and Gene Shiau, PerBlu earned second place and $7,000 in the 2008 G. Steven Burrill Technology Business Plan Competition. The students’ product, Parallel Kingdom, is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game for Global Positioning System-enabled mobile phones. The company has the competitive advantage of being first to market with a mobile multiplayer role-playing game that uses a GPS to allow the player to physically interact with the surrounding virtual world. The game first will be available on the Google Android mobile phone, but any type of phone with GPS is a potential platform. The students hope to raise venture capital to further develop the game and capture market share.