NSF's Partnerships for Innovations connects engineering PhDs with small business
Sep 21, 2011
Thayer School has been awarded a grant from NSF's Partnerships for Innovations (PFI) program to support students in Dartmouth's Ph.D. Innovation Program and connect them with small businesses involved in technologies for sensory enhancement and mobile sensor systems. The applications of such technologies include visual and auditory sensory enhancement devices; body-worn devices for biomedical monitoring and enhancing biomechanics performance (e.g., in athletes, disabled, or elderly people); remote, wireless monitoring of machines and structures (e.g., wind turbines, aircraft, bridges); and wireless sensor networks.
The project is anchored by Thayer School's long tradition of innovation and entrepreneurship along with its offering the nation's first doctoral-level engineering Innovation Program designed to provide Ph.D. graduates with the entrepreneurial training they need to turn research discoveries into marketable technologies. The grant will support three Ph.D. Innovation Program students for two years each, followed by three years of fellowship support from Thayer School.
Dartmouth's PFI investigators are engineering professors Laura Ray, Kofi Odame, and Eric Fossum, with engineering Dean Joseph Helble serving as the project's Senior Administrator. Dartmouth's small business partners are:
