The University of Washington Coulter Translational Research Partnership (TRP) Program is pleased to announce the 2014-2015 awardees of Coulter funding to support commercialization of medical research. Five teams of university faculty won $100,000 grants in June 2014, awarded competitively from an initial field of 16 applications.
Receiving a second full year of Coulter funding are Drs. Shwetak Patel (Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical Engineering), James W. Stout (Pediatrics) and James A. Taylor (Pediatrics) for a new technology to assess neonatal jaundice. Drs. Samuel Browd (Neurological Surgery), Jonathan Posner (Mechanical Engineering), and Per Reinhall (Mechanical Engineering) with Dave Marver (CEO, Project Canton) were awarded a full year of funding for a novel football helmet design to reduce traumatic brain injury after receiving seed funding from Coulter in 2013-2014. Newly funded teams are Drs. Les Atlas (Electrical Engineering) and Jay Rubinstein (Otolaryngology, Bioengineering) for an algorithm to provide enhanced perception of tonality in cochlear implants; Drs. Peter Cavanagh (Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine), Mark Ganter (Mechanical Engineering), Murray Maitland (Rehabilitation Medicine), Katherine Steele (Mechanical Engineering), and Duane Storti (Mechanical Engineering) with Research Prosthetist Kate Allyn (UW Bioengineering Lab) for a novel foot prosthetic to improve balance and walking on uneven surfaces; and Drs. Blake Hannaford (Electrical Engineering), Timothy Kowalewski (Mechanical Engineering, UMN), and Thomas Lendvay (Urology) with Derek Streat (UW C4C) for a software platform to evaluate surgical technique via crowdsourcing.
The Coulter TRP Program began in 2005 with a grant to the University of Washington from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation. The awards are designed to promote translational research by increasing the number of effective collaborations between biomedical engineers and clinicians, supporting the development of promising technologies to clinical application. The ultimate goal of this partnership is to save, extend and improve patient lives suffering from any disease or condition, in any size market, in any country around the world.
For more information, contact Kathie Jordan, Coulter Program Director, kjordan@uw.edu, or Kassandra Thomson, Assistant Director, coulter1@uw.edu.