Business Incubator Honors Professors for Technology Innovations

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Umit Ozkan

Ronald Xu


Two Ohio State College of Engineering faculty members have been honored by TechColumbus for their innovations in technology.

Ronald Xu, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, was named 2010 Inventor of the Year; Umit Ozkan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, was named 2010 Outstanding Woman in Technology.

TechColumbus, a technology business incubator, holds its Innovation Awards annually to recognize outstanding achievements in technology leadership and innovation.

Xu has been working closely with Ohio State medical clinicians to invent handheld imaging tools and biodegradable contrast agents for disease targeting, intraoperative imaging and image-guided therapy.

His primary clinical interests include cancer imaging and therapy, wound healing and ocular drug delivery. He has been principal investigator or co-investigator of 14 projects that have received, in total, more than $1.14 million in funding; principal investigator or co-investigator of five clinical trials at the Ohio State University Medical Center; inventor or co-inventor of eight published patents; and author or co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications. In 2010, he was profiled as one of the 10 best and brightest “Superstars” of Central Ohio by Columbus CEO magazine.

Before joining The Ohio State University faculty in 2004, Xu was director of technology development at a medical device startup company in the Silicon Valley for four years, leading the company effort on technology innovation, commercialization and FDA approval of a novel near infrared portable device for noninvasive detection of tissue oxygenation. Xu earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology followed by a postdoctoral training at Stanford University.

Other Ohio State College of Engineering faculty and alumni who were semi-finalists for the Inventor of the Year award were Jeffrey Chalmers, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering; L.S. Fan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering; Jed Johnson, ’05 B.S., ’08 M.S. and ’10 Ph.D., materials science and engineering and co-founder and chief technology officer of a company called Nanofiber Solutions; John Lannutti, professor of materials science and engineering and co-founder and chief scientist of Nanofiber Solutions; Stephen Craig Lee, associate professor of biomedical engineering; and Jessica Winter, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and biomedical engineering.

Ozkan was honored as Outstanding Woman in Technology for her research accomplishments in heterogeneous catalysis with applications in renewable energy and environmental protection. For example, she found a way to convert ethanol and other biofuels into hydrogen very efficiently by developing a new catalyst that makes hydrogen from ethanol with 90 percent yield, at a workable temperature, and using inexpensive ingredients.

TechColumbus said she “has not only won grants and awards for her research, but has been honored for her teaching excellence. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, honored for her research and her service as a teacher, mentor and administrator. She is a role model for women studying engineering.”

Ozkan leads the Heterogeneous Catalysis Research Group at Ohio State and has been a faculty member in engineering since 1985. She also has served as the college’s associate dean for research. Ozkan received an Iowa State University Professional Achievement Citation in Engineering; received the John van Geuns Lectureship Award at the Van’t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences at the University of Amsterdam; and was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and received that organization’s Mentorship Excellence Award.

Other Ohio State College of Engineering semi-finalists in the Outstanding Woman in Technology were Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska and Linda Weavers, both professors of civil and environmental engineering and geodetic science.
Categories: AwardsCollege