Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Diseases of the blood, like sickle cell disease, have traditionally taken at least a full day, tedious lab work and expensive equipment to diagnose, but researchers have developed a way to diagnose these conditions with greater precision in only one minute.

PufferBot is the brainchild of graduate student Hooman Hedayati and his colleagues at the ATLAS Institute at CU Boulder. It’s a skittish machine: This hovering quadcopter drone comes complete with a plastic shield that can expand in size at a moment’s notice—forming a robotic airbag that could prevent dangerous collisions between people and machines.

CU Boulder vice chancellor for research and innovation Terri Fiez said, “the composition of the community is very unique” — a blend of innovative startups, an entrepreneurial ethos, and the presence of national labs, large technology companies and a world class research university.

The innovative Center for Leadership pulls 22 leadership programs together on the CU Boulder campus and adds a new leadership research element run by Stefanie Johnson, associate professor of Organizational Leadership and Information Analytics in the Leeds School of Business.

The CU Boulder undergrad has been an entrepreneur since 2011, founding and running a variety of businesses to profit. He founded Exchanging303, a premium clothing reseller, and Flippers, a business buying, fixing and reselling cracked iPhones. He has interned at Northwestern Mutual and Boulder’s Boomtown Accelerators and is now a venture intern at Denver’s Stout Street Capital.

The Research & Innovation Office (RIO) invites students, faculty, staff and the community to join Research & Innovation Week, Oct. 12–16. The 2020 streamlined edition will feature three virtual events that you’ll only be able to find at CU Boulder.

“This investment and grant capital is critical for our operations through 2021 and will allow us to further develop and harden our HASEL technology while demonstrating intelligent motion solutions in customer driven applications,” said CEO Dr. Tim Morrissey.

The company was recently awarded $225,000 through the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and $310,000 through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). These awards will allow the company to further technologies in the field of gastroenterology, specifically their C-Tube product line that incorporates proprietary Pillar™ micro-texture technology.

Wieman, a former 25-year physics professor at CU Boulder and current Stanford physics professor, was the founder of CU Boulder’s award-winning PhET Interactive Simulations project. Working with Kathy Perkins, director of PhET and a faculty member in CU Boulder’s Department of Physics, Wieman will use the prize money to support PhET’s mission to advance STEM education globally.

For MBA students looking for an unconventional internship alternative, Entrepreneurial Solutions (ES) provides students at Leeds School of Business with the opportunity to start their own consulting business.