Present and Past: Rhode Island Business Plan Competition winners from Brown

Brown students enrolled in Entrepreneurship & New Ventures ENGN1930x course consistently do well in the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition. This year Speramus, which developed its business plan in the course last semester, won the student track. The company is creating an online fundraising platform that uses a proprietary ranking system to match donors with individual support opportunities. In addition, Bakodo which developed its business plan in the course last year was runner up in the entrepreneur track. The company is focused on developing a highly-targeted, contextual barcode ad-serving network that aims to optimize return on investment for advertisers. For more information on this year's winners, visit here.

Last year's winner, Runa, who also developed their business plan in the Entrepreneurship and New Ventures course continues to make excellent progress. They have successfully raised funds from angel investors, successfully built out their vertically integrated supply chain in Ecuador, and begun selling their initial tea products in both loose leaf pouches and single serve bags. If you are interested in trying Runa, feel free to buy a cup at Blue State in Providence which now proudly serves it! You can read more at www.drinkruna.com

In addition the runner-up from last year, Eulie has also grown from the intial business plan they developed in the Entrepreneurship and New Ventures course. Both founders raised capital to work full-time on Eulie, developed and successfully tested a novel patent-pending fabric combination that is leak proof, and designed products that will be used to approach retail buyers later this year. You can read more at www.eulieintimates.com

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Richardson elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians

Professor Peter Richardson, has been elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, founded in London in 1518 with a Charter from King Henry VIII.

“I am deeply honored,” he said, “William Harvey was not even born when the College was founded, but he was a leading light of the Royal College of Physicians and a devoted supporter of it, as have been many other famous contributors to the science and practice of medicine before and since. It is known I have been interested in some aspects of the circulation of blood in the conduct of research for four decades, and the College is very generous in inviting me into its ranks, a very rare honor indeed.”

Peter Richardson has been Professor of Engineering and Physiology at Brown University since 1983. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Fellow of the City and Guilds of London Institute, as well as Life Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a Founding Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, an Inaugural Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society, and a Laureate in Medicine of the Ernst Jung Foundation (Germany).

With one of his doctoral students, Leigh Abts, and some colleagues Richardson helped found MicroPure, a Rhode Island company which started from technology developed for operating room use during cardiac surgery and spun it off into uses for microprocessor manufacture and secondary oil recovery; the company was sold later to a large process-industries company. “Technology transfer can work both ways between medicine and engineering,” Richardson notes.

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Nurmikko elected to Finnish Academy of Science and Letters

Professor Arto Nurmikko was recently elected to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters is the largest general scientific and academic society in Finland. It is a learned society covering the full range of academic disciplines which is devoted to the promotion of scientific and scholarly research and serves as a bond uniting researchers engaged in these activities at the highest level. It functions as a traditional learned society in the sense that its membership is limited and it selects its new members on their academic and scientific merits. For more information on the Academy: http://www.acadsci.fi/frontpage.htm

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Science News highlights aerial gymnastics of fruit flies

Science News 12 April 2010
Fruit flies make abrupt turns

Postdoctoral research associate in engineering Attila Bergou is part of a research team that discovered that fruit flies’ aerial gymnastics are driven by wing joints that act like wind-up toys, letting the bugs whirl around almost automatically.
Learn more here:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/58108/title/Fruit_flies_turn_on_autopilot

Flies "swim" when they're flying from Science News on Vimeo.

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Science Nation profiles NSF collaborative project on bat flight mechanics

Brown University engineer Kenny Breuer and biologist Sharon Swartz are profiled in this week's Science Nation, a science video series commissioned by the NSF Office of Legislative and Public Affairs.
Since 2001, Swartz and Breuer have teamed up to study the mechanics of bat flight. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the two scientists from very different disciplines set up a special facility, including a wind tunnel, to study bats in flight.

Learn more about the project here:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/index.jsp

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Gao and his research team discovers new principle in Material Science

A research team led by Brown University engineers has discovered a new mechanism that governs the peak strength of nanostructured metals. The team found that the deformation of nanotwinned metals is characterized by the motion of highly ordered, necklace-like patterns of crystal defects called dislocations. The finding, published in Nature, could lead to stronger and more ductile metals.

Full press release here:
http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2010/04/nanotwins

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Hurt and Webster publish "Business and Safety Issues in the Commercialization of Nanotechnology"

Professors Bob Hurt and Tom Webster just published the book "Business and Safety Issues in the Commercialization of Nanotechnology," Materials Research Society Symposium Proceedings, Volume 1209, 2010. Editors are: L. Tsakalakos, L. Merhari, S. Mao, J. van Schijndel, T. J. Webster, H. Liu, and R. Hurt. (H. Liu is a recent Ph.D. graduate from Brown engineering).

More information on the book can be found at: http://www.mrs.org/s_mrs/sec_subscribe.asp?CID=24653&DID=271618

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