Business Incubator Names Professor Inventor of Year

Ronald Xu, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, was named 2010 Inventor of the Year by TechColumbus, a technology business incubator.

Xu has been working closely with Ohio State medical clinicians to invent handheld imaging tools and biodegradable contrast agents for disease targeting, intra-operative 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; and inventor or co-inventor of eight published patents.

Other Ohio State 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.