In October, the National Science Foundation selected 21 teams for the inaugural class of NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) awards. Two of those awards went to faculty at current and graduated ERCs (Ellis Meng, at BMES; and Michael Silevitch, at CenSSIS, respectively).

Spanning a broad range of target products, geographic locales and research fields, the teams will receive guidance from private- and public-sector experts, participate in a specially designed training curriculum, and receive $50,000 to begin assessing the commercial readiness of their technology concepts.

"I-Corps has generated tremendous excitement," says I-Corps program officer Errol Arkilic. "Our first round of awards emerged from a wide array of fields and strong fundamental research efforts. All show promise as potential innovations that could yield additional direct benefits to society."

In total, the awards were representative of six NSF directorates: Engineering; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; Biology; Mathematics and Physical Sciences; Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences; and Education and Human Resources.

The I-Corps program selects up to 25 teams on a quarterly basis to assess the commercial viability of their previously-supported basic research.

The ERC teams receiving I-Corps awards were:

Establishing an innovation ecosystem for technology transition of MEMS-based drug infusion pumps
Principal Investigator: Ellis Meng (ellismen@usc.edu); Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems ERC;
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Calif.

MySkinTone: A breakthrough technology and product for skin melanin evaluation
Principal Investigator: Michael Silevitch (msilevit@censsis.neu.edu); Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems; Northeastern University, Boston, Mass.

The NSF press release is at http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=121879&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click