The 2014 UNSW Innovation Awards honoured a few big ideas including a
revolutionary rock sampling technology that achieved commercial success and a
solar collector that could be used to heat or cool buildings.
Now in its sixth year, the Innovation Awards, coordinated by UNSW’s
technology transfer and innovation office New South Innovations (NSi),
recognise major research discoveries and inventions made by staff and students.
The NSi Awards recognise every stage of the innovation path from invention,
through early and advanced stages, to fully developed products with commercial
applications.
Professors Val Pinczewski and Christoph Arns from the School of Petroleum
Engineering received international attention earlier this year when
the digital core analysis technology they co-developed with ANU researchers
sold to US company FEI for $76 million.
Seen as a textbook case of technology transfer from lab to industry
delivering financial returns, it has brought recognition for its co-creators in
the form of the Innovator of the Year Award and the Innovation Impact Award.
The top student prize as well as the Early Stage Innovation Award went
to three students enrolled at the School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy
Engineering (SPREE), Cheng Zheng, Qiyuan Li, Albert Woffenden, who together
with SPREE lecturer and supervisor Dr Robert Taylor created a novel
concentrating solar collector designed compactly for installation on a building
rooftop.
Cheng explained that their big idea involved designing a solar collector
that was similar in appearance to photovoltaic panels, but in a thin and
lightweight form with the ability to deliver up to 400°C thermal energy. As a
renewable alternative to gas, electricity, oil and coal, the new solar
collector could dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions.
Winners of 2014 UNSW Innovation
Awards:
UNSW Entrepreneur of the Year Award went to Brad Lorge, Nick Darvey,
Matt Moss and Kenneth Wong for the FoodBank Local, a system that connects
food vendors with charities.
Best New Invention Award was given to Scientia Professor Andrew
Dzurak, Menno Veldhorst and Chih-Hwan Henry Yang for discovering a way to create
an ‘artificial atom’ quantum bit that can process quantum data with
accuracy above 99%.
Advanced Innovation Award went to Gary Housley, Jeremy Pinyon,
Matthias Klugmann, Kristina Froud, Ann Wong, Edward Crawford and Renee Morris
from the School of Medical Sciences, Translational Neuroscience Facility for
innovating a new method to deliver gene therapy using electrical pulses
delivered from a cochlear implant, and successfully re-growing auditory nerves.
People’s Choice Award was given to Eisa Zarepour, Muhbub Hassan and
Adesoji Adesina for their innovation ‘Nano Sensor Networks for Improving the
Performance of Chemical Reactors’.