Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Deshpande Center delivers $500K in spring round of grants

The Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT has awarded a total of $500,000 in grants to seven MIT research teams in its latest round of grants.

The winning projects include research on disease therapies, micro-manufacturing, wireless communications, web search, semiconductors, drug discovery, and hearing for the impaired.

Each spring and fall, the Deshpande Center awards grants that fund proof-of-concept explorations and validation for emerging technologies. The Deshpande Center said it has provided about $8.7 million in grants to 75 MIT research projects since 2002. Fourteen startups have spun out of the center, including Myomo Inc. and Pervasis Therapeutics Inc.

The spring 2008 grant recipients, and their projects are:

• Joel Dawson: energy-efficient, high-rate data transmitters for broadband wireless communications intended to increase battery life in handsets and reduce heat generation in base stations.
• Patrick Doyle: a new method to perform multitarget bioassays using microparticles that could enable clinical bedside diagnostics and easier, less-costly diagnosis of disease. Renewal from spring 2007 grant round.
• Douglas Hart: an in-ear, 3-D digital scanner for custom-fitting hearing aids.
• Susan Lindquist: the development of therapeutic strategies to combat difficult-to-treat bacterial biofilm infections.
• Tomás Palacios: a new approach to the fabrication technology of gallium nitride semiconductors to reduce the cost and improve the performance of electronic products. (Renewal from spring 2007 grant round.)
• Peter So: a 3-D, two-photon microfabrication system intended to rapidly build high-resolution micro-scale structures.
• Michael Stonebraker: search capability for the "deep web" of pages dynamically generated from data entered into forms.