Innovation Pilot Awards

Florida Atlantic University’s Office of Technology Development recently announced the first two faculty recipients of its Innovation Pilot Awards.

“This new pilot award program is designed to provide seed funding to researchers to support commercialization for early-stage innovations,” said Dana Vouglitois, senior associate director of Technology Development. “They can use the funds for testing, prototyping and other proof-of-concept studies to accomplish specific milestones that demonstrate the innovation’s value and reduce risk to potential industry partners.”

The goals of the program include developing innovations to bring them closer to market, licensing innovations to industry partners, formation of new companies and attracting external follow-on funding.

• Robert J. Stackman Jr., Ph.D., dean of the Graduate College, associate vice president for Academic Affairs at the John D. MacArthur Campus, and professor in the Department of Psychology, and Claire A. Rice, Ph.D. at the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, earned a $5,000 pilot award for the project “Novel Drug Treatment of Cognitive Impairments Associated with Schizophrenia.”
  
  More than 20 million people worldwide are living with schizophrenia. While antipsychotics are widely used to treat the condition, most have limited therapeutic efficacy, particularly with treating attention and memory deficits caused by the disease. This novel drug treatment proposes repurposing chlorzoxazone (CZX), a pharmaceutical that is currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration for short-term treatment of muscle or bone pain. CZX can activate small conductance calcium-activated potassium (SK) ion channels, which are associated with synaptic plasticity and can play a role in learning and memory functions. Preclinical animal studies of schizophrenia conducted by Rice and Stackman show CZX significantly reduced memory deficits, indicating a promising treatment for cognitive symptoms in schizophrenic patients.
• Georgios Sklivanitis, Ph.D., Charles E. Schmidt research associate professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, College of Engineering and Computer Science, received a $5,000 pilot award for his project “Affordable and Programmable Underwater Wireless Modems to Build the Internet of Floating Things.”
  
  Oceans are vast, crucial parts of the environment and the economy, but understanding how they work — measuring them at scale — is expensive, Sklivanitis said. Scientists and engineers are limited in the amount of granular data they can collect. However, standard Internet of Things technologies (e.g, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS) cannot operate underwater, which has left 70% of the planet (the ocean) beyond reach, he said. This limits the effectiveness of shipping and logistics, aquaculture, and climate modeling. It limits the ability to predict the weather, including catastrophic events such as hurricanes. And it limits the ability to rapidly construct offshore wind farms while protecting endangered North Atlantic Right whales. Sklivanitis and his team said they developed a novel small underwater modem that provides real-time communication and positioning. They developed a first-of-its-kind prototype of the device and tested it first in a water tank and then in a shallow marina environment to show proof-of-concept. The device is able to adapt on-the-fly the implementation of its communication protocol (for example switch between an underwater acoustic version of Bluetooth and WiFi) depending on the application requirements and the environment characteristics.
  
  “We are thrilled to have received this pilot award, which marks a significant milestone in our journey towards commercializing our innovative underwater wireless technology,” Sklivanitis said. “This support will accelerate our development efforts, ensuring that we can bring this transformative technology to market more swiftly and effectively.”

The awards were announced during the Florida Atlantic’s recent Innovation Awards Celebration.

Learn more about the Innovation Pilot Award Program.