CONTACT:
Jeanan Yasiri Moe, Director of Strategic Communications
[email protected] | 608.960.9892
$100K fund to accelerate solutions being developed by UW-Madison researchers
MADISON, Wis. – The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation announced that nine highly deployable projects have been selected to receive development funding through the UW/WARF COVID-19 Accelerator Challenge. From improved respirators to accelerated testing, these innovations are designed to be rapidly advanced over the coming months to combat the pandemic.
WARF received dozens of submissions from PIs and their teams across a wide range of affiliations, including the State Lab of Hygiene, UW Makerspace, statistics, design studies and engineering.
The selected projects are led by the following PIs:
- Azam Ahmed (neurological surgery) and Terrence Oakes (radiology) for safe and sanitizable technologies to help prevent virus spread in a hospital setting
- Kayley Janssen (Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene) for surveillance of the virus in wastewaters
- Tim Osswald (mechanical engineering) for mass production of cleanable and reusable respirators
- Kalpana Raja and Ron Stewart (Morgridge Institute for Research) for a drug repurposing discovery system
- Joshua Medow (biomedical engineering) for a digital assistance system for medical staff
- Lennon Rodgers (UW Makerspace) for a compact air-purifying respirator
- David O’Connor (pathology and laboratory medicine), Thomas Friedrich (pathobiological sciences) and David Beebe (biomedical engineering) for accelerated COVID-19 testing
- Nathan Sherer (oncology) for an assay to identify virus inhibitors
- Brian Yandell (statistics) for a method to track and visualize the outbreak in counties with small populations
“We are grateful to WARF for offering this opportunity to UW-Madison and Morgridge Institute for Research researchers, from faculty to staff and students,” says Steve Ackerman, UW-Madison vice chancellor for research and graduate education. “These grants are critical to helping our research community more quickly advance commercially promising technologies closer to the marketplace in response to COVID-19 impacts. It’s partnerships such as this one with WARF that allows us to tackle the immediate and ongoing challenges that this pandemic presents.”
“When WARF announced this initiative back in April we did not know what kind of response we would receive given the many challenges – personal and scientific – our research community faces at this time,” says Erik Iverson, chief executive officer of WARF. “The response was overwhelming. We are grateful, humbled, and excited to see how these innovations advance over the coming months to help our world respond and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Projects not selected for funding through the UW/WARF COVID-19 Challenge may still be connected to other supportive resources within WARF.
WARF remains open for business during the COVID-19 circumstance and continues to welcome invention disclosures from UW-Madison faculty, staff and students.
About WARF
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) helps steward the cycle of research, discovery, commercialization and investment for the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Founded in 1925 as an independent, nonprofit foundation, WARF manages more than 2,000 patents and an investment portfolio as it funds university research, obtains patents for campus discoveries and licenses inventions to industry. For more information, visit warf.org.
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