 Good afternoon, I'm Bob Wilhelm, Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I'd like to welcome you to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Research Days and the New Tech Ventures Annual Innovator Celebration. It's a pleasure to be speaking to you today to recognize and celebrate the innovative work and the successes of our faculty, our staff, our graduate students, and our students. We have an incredible range of research and creative activity at UNL that can be translated by companies into products, into services that create new jobs, grow our economy, and improve the quality of life. Additionally, the inventive and the creative efforts of our campus are focused on building on our research strengths, on growth, on impact, and New Tech Ventures is a key partner in this work. New Tech Ventures technology transfer operations have continued to grow in FY20 with 30 issued U.S. patents, 31 license agreements, and of which six licenses went to UNL startup companies. New Tech also continues to grow licensing revenue, totaling $6.6 million in FY20 and distributed royalties, totaling $4.9 million to inventors, colleges, and the campus. Creative activities and opportunities also are growing at UNL in collaboration with the College of Business Center for Entrepreneurship, the National Strategic Research Institute, and Invest Nebraska New Tech Ventures launched the Nebraska Introduction to Customer Discovery program during FY20. The first two cohorts include 30 teams from across campus and throughout the NU system who participated in a program to understand customer needs and the value proposition of their innovation. The successes we are seeing at UNL create a strong pipeline from research to economic development and that's helping to drive the growth of our research enterprise, entrepreneurship, and the innovation campus. I want to thank all of you who are with us online today who have contributed to this success and I look forward to hearing these stories of innovation. I also want to congratulate our FY20 patent recipients and innovation award winners. Well done. I'm proud to share this message with you today to celebrate innovators and innovation at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. You should be incredibly proud to be part of a university that for three years in a row has ranked in the top 100 in the world for earning U.S. patents. That's phenomenal. Thanks to all of our faculty, staff, and student innovators for your contributions and for this opportunity to recognize your hard work in this especially challenging year. We're all navigating our work in new ways during this global pandemic. You show real grit in the effort to move your research and creative work forward. This is a moment to acknowledge the glory of your innovative research activities and commercialization accomplishments. Nebraska researchers do exceptional work for the good of Nebraska and around the world. You're providing innovative solutions to problems to enhance quality of life and to grow the Nebraska economy, including as just a few examples. New diagnostic tests for COVID-19 antibodies. New prebiotic and probiotic compositions to aid human health. Wheat, soybean, and dry bean varieties to enhance the productivity of Nebraska farmers. 60 million acres of farmland in North America this past year planted with herbicide tolerant soybeans and cotton with a gene first developed here at UNL. New innovations in medical devices and robotic surgery. Development of new polymer materials with the potential to greatly improve the energy efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells. Startup companies advancing UNL technology to improve organic weed control. Pavement surface de-icing, pediatric cancer diagnostics, and gut health. And an award-winning documentary film just released chronicling the Czech Republic's Velvet Revolution in 1968. Earlier this year, we launched our N 2025 strategic plan in which we endeavor to nurture and develop the culture we have for increasing the impact of research and creative activity. And to foster even more innovative interdisciplinary work towards solving challenges critical to Nebraska and the world. That means more research, more technology, more impact, and more entrepreneurship in advancing all of it to the marketplace. Everyone tuning into this remote event can and should be a part of it. By strengthening your connections within UTEC Ventures, industry relations, and Nebraska Innovation Campus with the goal of expanding societal impact from your work, and advocating for commercialization and public-private partnerships. Your work and how you connect with others to increase its impact is essential for the strategic vision we're pursuing at Nebraska. Thank you for all you do, particularly in these challenging times, and congratulations on your innovative contributions and achievements. I'm Brad Roth, the Executive Director of UTEC Ventures. And I, too, would like to welcome you to the 2020 Innovator Celebration. This event gives us the opportunity to recognize and to celebrate the work of UNL inventors and creators, and also to announce the winners of our annual Innovator Awards. While we usually gather in person, we are thankful for the opportunity to take time in the midst of a challenging year, and again, recognize and celebrate the achievements of our campus colleagues. I'd like to start off by recognizing some of the people whose partnership makes technology commercialization possible. First of all, our faculty, staff, and graduate student innovators and creators. Over the past year, you've disclosed 106 new inventions to UTEC Ventures. This is an important first step in the commercialization process, and it's resulted in numerous patent filings. And in years to come, we look forward to license agreements for the commercialization of your innovative work. Today, we recognize and celebrate each of you. Thank you for your contributions. We also want to recognize inventors on issued U.S. patents during fiscal year 2020. Congratulations to each Nebraska researcher who has been a named inventor on an issued U.S. patent during the last year. A list of our FY20 patent inventors and the patents themselves are available in New Tech Ventures annual report, which is available online at newtechventures.org. I'd also like to recognize and thank our deans, associate deans, department heads, center directors, and senior administrators at the university. Thank you for supporting our research enterprise and encouraging researchers to engage in the commercialization process. Lastly, I'd also like to recognize the intellectual property firms who have generously provided support for our innovator celebration and the awards. Thanks for your support. It is certainly a pleasure to work with each of you. And now, I'm excited to introduce our 2020 Innovator Award winners, including campus inventors, one of our partner companies, and a faculty startup company. Their work exemplifies our mission at New Tech Ventures to improve quality of life and to promote economic development. I trust you will enjoy the following videos and congratulate our award winners along with me. My name is Shadeep Thadejary. I'm an assistant professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering at UNL. In order to achieve energy sustainability, we need to overcome the challenges in energy conversion and storage devices. And ion conduction is the core function of electrochemical systems. However, there is a big ion transport limitations that means ion conduction is really poor in sub-micron thick polymeric layers, which are used as a coating over the catalyst particles and that negatively impacts the energy efficiency of fuel cells. So we have been inspired by natural systems where the proton conduction are very efficient through biomolecular channels. And inspired by those, we are right now designing some ion-conducting polymers incorporating natural mimicking functional repeat units. And we have also been able to impart getting functionalities to these polymers, which makes the diffusion of protons even faster. Right now, I'm collaborating with fuel cell catalyst-developing research groups and I'm trying to demonstrate that these ion-conducting polymers are performing equally well in a complex fuel cell environment. So if everything goes alright, then maybe five to ten years down the line, I will think about commercializing this ionomers through my own startup. Combined heat and power system can be really attractive for Nebraska and that uses proton exchange membrane fuel cell technology. So any improvement in hydrogen fuel cell technology that will impact these combined heat and power systems. Also, there are some local industries which produces hydrogen as a by-product. So because hydrogen is the fuel for hydrogen fuel cell, so if PMFC becomes an economical choice, then these industries will also be benefited. If you want to achieve energy sustainability, if you want to improve the quality of life, then you have to think about technology transfer from lab bench to the marketplace, right? So New Tech Venture has been very supportive in protecting our intellectual properties, licensing and technology transfer and many other things. So I would like to thank New Tech Venture for their great support. The creative side of my soul actually finds peace in research. You know, at different points of my life, I have sparked as a cook, as a fashion designer, as a singer, as a researcher and many more, but I'm really happy that I picked academic research because here I can pick a problem that I'm really passionate about and work really hard to find the solutions of those. And if my small contribution to achieve energy sustainability and improving the quality of life, then that's good enough to have good night's sleep. My name is Bob Hudkins. I'm a professor of food microbiology in the Department of Food Science and Technology and I'm also one of the members of the Nebraska Food for Health Center. The platform that we've developed allows us to study the gut microbiota both in humans, but we could also scale this down and do study the activities of that gut microbiota in the laboratory. So we could set up little what we call gut fermenters in the laboratory and they mimic fairly well what happens in the human gastrointestinal tract. The challenge is, and it's a considerable challenge, is that the gut microbiome is complex, it's unique to every individual and it's remarkably stable. So that means that it's difficult to cause those kinds of changes that we want to bring about. Now what this allows us to do in a very high throughput way is to perturb that gut that those little gut fermenters and then we could determine what changes have occurred. This is one of the breakthroughs that we've had is that we can now fish out those strains that have responded to whatever input we've imposed in that little gut microbiota fermenter. In my group we can design experiments, we can perform experiments, we can collect the data, we can analyze the data and we're good at publishing our results in high impact journals. Where we're less skilled is in being able to translate and convey that information to the stakeholders, to consumers, to the industry. We formed a company called Symbiotic Health a number of years ago. It really kind of set idle for a long time because faculty are busy, we all have our day jobs, but we had in the back of our mind that we'd have to devote some time to this because we knew that the strains, the technology, the intellectual property that we had could make it could be commercialized and then we could reach more people and that's where NewTek has stepped in. So Givon and Cheryl and Brad and the NewTek staff that's what they're skilled at and so we've relied on them to take our knowledge and convey that whether it's in patents or in licensees or in other kinds of formats that can get what we think is very important information out to the public, to Nebraskans and even to the world to improve human health. I am George Gogos, I'm a professor in mechanical and materials engineering. The main focus of my research is heat transfer and fluid mechanics. Flame weeding is a quite old method. The first patent on flame weeding was in the 1850s but then the chemical industry came in with chemicals like Roundup and 24D and all kinds of chemicals and the industry was wiped out and it recovered again in the 90s, in the early 90s when organic farming started growing. In 2007 I received a phone call and email I think from Professor Stevan Knezovic. He's a weeds scientist, he's in the agronomy department at UNL and he was wondering, he was trying to find somebody with expertise in combustion to help him with new equipment, innovations in flame weeding equipment. So we decided to do some research. My engineering students were working during the summer very closely with the agronomy students of Professor Knezovic. This is something unique. It is this merger of the weed science and the engineering that basically led to some very very good equipment which the market was very receptive to it. We started interacting with NU Tech so there are a couple of patents and they're all within the torch. There's a primary intake for the torch and then the torch is surrounded by shields so that you can control where the hot gases are and there's a secondary air that is also introduced under the shields and that's where you get the the hot gases that will kill the weeds. It is a very harsh environment there because you get temperatures close to 2000 Fahrenheit at the flame and then at the exit of the shield you get temperatures that are about 1500 Fahrenheit. Flame weeding is like a surgery. You need to remove the malignancy without damaging the normal tissue that surrounds it. So similarly you have to remove the weeds without causing any damage to the crop. The reason that I'm excited about this research it protects the environment and we're trying to keep it as clean and as safe as possible and the team is great and I'm looking forward to working over the next I don't know five ten years with new startups and we know NU Tech will be there. My name is James Lusser in the filmmaking world. My name is James Dean Lusser for obvious reasons. I'm the chair of the department of history at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. In 2017 Mariana Chapkeva the producer and I as director of filmmaker producer we decided to make a movie called The Art of Descent and we wanted to make a movie that would show the power of positive political action that would be able to show us a way in a very different world that we live in today and I like 1989 it's a beautiful moment in time where the end of communism comes to pass you have the beginning of nascent democracies all over Europe and elsewhere and it was just a beautiful moment and we wanted to kind of look at that and say what happened in 1989 and why aren't we doing the same stuff today? You know so that's that was the original idea for the movie but we also wanted to make a movie that was about the dissidents movement in particular and we wanted to make a movie that would not just be about one person because there's lots of movies about about Vassal Havel or other people what we want to do is have a movie with that would that would demonstrate the the network of dissidents and how they work together to kind of bring communism and authoritarianism to an end in central eastern Europe. The thing I don't like about traditional work if you're oral historian or work with interviews is I don't like speaking for people and just and just not they don't see the person or hear the person I think film is that thing that allows us to let the person speak it's their voice their face and they can and and that's more authentic to me than just appropriating people and writing about them there's there's a journalistic kind of way of thinking with cameras and writing that really translates into how we make film and so I have the historical expertise of an historian but I also think like a journalist because journalism addresses contemporary issues right so even though this film really seems to be about dissidents it's really about our world today if you step back from and think about where we are the reason we made the movie is because of where we are today not just of the achievements of the past but to say let's not take our privileges democratic privileges for granted because people who didn't have them fought tooth and nail to get them and I think that the dissent movement Czechoslovakia is a perfect illustration of like the power of journalism film history together well New Tech became involved because we needed a producer Arpi was really important she's the one who kind of stewarded it and Brad Roth is one of the other people and Arpi and Brad worked together with me to help negotiate all this stuff we met many many times over the course of a year or two and we got it done and really deeply indebted to New Tech for the risks that they took and thinking about my ability to do this they trusted me right and I think it matters that I came to them having spent 20 years at the University of Nebraska and you know I'm proud to be here I really am and I think we can do ambitious things that other people can't do because they allow people like me to to take a risk with them it's impossible to say thank you in a way that really kind of meets the the role they played but I'm really really indebted to to University of Nebraska and New Tech in particular my name is Peter Pidelli I'm the current CEO and one of the founding partners of Omnitra Structures and ABC Group I work with David McGaw who's developing R&D and Matt Berkstrom who's our chief operating officer with responsible for our construction process improvements we had approximately six hurricanes pass over some of our critical buildings in the state of Florida I was tasked by one of our financial clients to head up a disaster response or a business continuity plan development for responding to future hurricanes from there we found and developed a dome process to house our disaster recovery equipment and our headquarters and protect our first responders we started to develop other processes and methods on how we could protect our infrastructure and our clients and one of the things that we started hearing the buzz about was electronic pulse basically a byproduct of a nuclear blast or an intentional weapon that would affect our electronics and so we started researching and finding University of Nebraska and a couple of professors named Chris Twan and Lim Nguyen who were actually working for on a STATCOM grant for alternatives to methods of how to shield for hemp hemp event we're in a multi-threat world with a lot of bad actors who basically live to threaten our way of life homeland security and Department of Energy Department of Defense has identified 16 areas of critical infrastructure which are vulnerable to both attacks and we think the the grid being the most critical to our way of life and vulnerable to those attacks University of Nebraska has a great facility great engineering department and a lot of resources that allow them to do R&D detail studies detail analysis and testing of major components in laboratory conditions it's one thing to build something as a prototype two feet tall in a laboratory and to take it into real-world conditions and build us a structure that's 20 or 30 thousand square feet with a lot of different components including mechanical electrical plumbing so we were able to combine University background information and experiments with our experience in construction that we were able to take the best of R&D and theory and apply it to a real-world condition the people at New Tech have been fantastic from Bradrock to Cheryl, Chris Twan, Lim Nguyen, Zane, Grunheardt all we've been very very cooperative very supportive and a very big part of our success we have to thank them very much for their cooperation and we look forward to more collaboration and opportunities in the future George Graf I'm a professor in plant breeding and genetics at the University of Nebraska in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture and I work with soybean breeding our main objectives then are to serve the needs of the soybean producers in Nebraska so our main focus is yield and productivity and then we need to protect that yield so we look at important disease and insect resistance and then any specific issues that Nebraska producers would have like water use we have about 50 percent irrigated production and 50 percent rain fed so in either system the soybeans that they grow need to respond well to the added water and then finally we have a lot of work with compositional quality we have some of the highest protein in soybeans that's known in the world so that's of interest because of interest in in vegetable protein sources protein has always been kind of limiting in the world in general and and now you know you hear a lot more about companies using vegetable protein sources the variety development timeline is about six years so from the time we initiate across usually in our winter nursery in Puerto Rico to the time it reaches the increase of foundation seed is about six years and then it's commercialized so some of the impacts of the research include you know not only the direct production of the varieties on the acres that they directly impact but also they're used as parents in breeding programs and other university USDA programs other public programs and also other private programs so they really impact you know several million acres the new tech's a good partner because we can work at different stages of the program a lot of what we do here is is pretty straightforward and so it's at the end of the development that we recognize something new and valuable and then they can help commercialize it but there's also situations where they facilitated the the partnerships that we have for example with some industry partners or you know help us develop collaboration agreements that are really the beginning of a relationship and then they're the results from those things are more long-term what's exciting is you know one of the areas where a lot of the germplasm we see a lot of interest is newer companies and more recent startup companies that are applying molecular genetic tools or more analytical tools to facilitate breeding and be have specific targets and goals for the varieties and and their markets but to see those companies use the material and to see those applications come out the other other side and and be successfully commercialized is is really rewarding congratulations again to all of our award winners as well as our patent inventors and everyone who has engaged and partnered with our office during the last year we each have a role to play in advancing technology from the lab to the marketplace to improve quality of life and to promote economic development we look forward to continuing to work with you even in these challenging times thank you for taking time out of your schedules to join us today for our 2020 innovator celebration have a great week