By Justin Bannister, NMSU News Center
New Mexico State University’s Arrowhead Center will host a reception to recognize the 2012 and 2013 Launch competition award winners. The event is open to the public and will take place from 4-6 p.m. April 17 at the Arrowhead Center. Business leader and entrepreneur Bradley B. Gordon also will take part in the ceremony recognizing the winners.
Gordon has more than 25 years of experience starting and acquiring new companies, primarily in the biotech field, where he held executive positions in both venture capital and corporate management. His primary focus has been applying major advances in medical science to the development of breakthrough biomedical products. These include startup ventures that helped pioneer the fields of human gene therapy, small molecule regulation of disease genes, and novel stem cell therapies. Gordon earned a bachelor’s degree in business from NMSU and an MBA with extended studies in finance from the University of Southern California. In 2010, Gordon received an honorary doctorate from NMSU.
“Launch provides an opportunity for NMSU’s award-winning researchers to collaborate with a diverse team of professionals at the earliest stages of development,” said Jason Koenig, the director of Launch at the Arrowhead Center. “Launch awardees go through a very competitive process to showcase how an early stage investment in their promising technology can help move it into the marketplace.”
The NMSU faculty members selected to participate in technology commercialization through the Launch proof of concept program will receive mentoring, market analyses, demonstration-validation services, access to investment networks and up to $25,000 in cash investment in their technology. This support allows campus inventors to work on technology development while exploring commercial markets for the products of their research.
The 2013 awardees include:
• Jessica Houston and Mark Naivar, in the field of commercial flow cytometers.
• Zohrab Samani, who developed an app for properly scheduling irrigations for pecan fields. The preliminary results suggest that this irrigation scheduling system can improve crop yields and potentially can decrease water usage.
• Phillip De Leon, Don McCoy and Steven Spence, focusing on Internet security software using voice authentication.
The 2012 awardees include:
• Jeffrey Arterburn, Charles Shuster and Kevin Houston, who focus on a new class of fluorescent organic dyes and associated compounds referred to as “HPY-Dyes,” with applications in biological, biomedical and biotechnology fields as indicators of cell viability and function.
• Geoffrey Smith and Shuguang Deng, who developed a bacteria culture that produces large quantities of hydrogen gas and is able to capture that gas in a biopolymer. The technology can produce hydrogen gas and a hydrogen-storing biopolymer from organic waste.
The Arrowhead Center is located at 3655 Research Drive, Genesis Center Building C, on the NMSU campus. For more information, or to RSVP, contact Zetdi Runyan at ati@nmsu.edu or 575-646-7833.
