University of Washington Center for Commercialization

Daniel T. Chiu is the A. Bruce Montgomery Professor of Chemistry at UW, where he is a member of the Center for Nanotechnology and the Neurobiology and Behavior Program. He is also a member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s Cancer Consortium. Daniel’s research activity is focused on the development of new tools that combine ultrasensitive laser-based detection and manipulation methodologies with micro- and nano-fabrication techniques for interfacing with biological systems at the nanometer scale, and on applying these new techniques for addressing biological problems and towards understanding biological complexity. Daniel played a part in founding MiCareo, which currently is developing a device to detect and isolate circulating tumor cells in blood.

Joel Durand is Professor of Music and Associate Director of the UW School of Music at UW, where he has taught composition, analysis, and theory since 1991. Joel’s music has been commissioned and performed by many leading ensembles and orchestras in Europe, the US, Brazil, and South Korea. His work for orchestra, Athanor, was premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2003 and was released on a CD (Mode Records) in 2004. Joel developed a high-end tonearm, the Talea, for demanding audiophiles and markets them through his start-up Durand-Tonearms LLC. The result of over 2000 hours of research and development, Joel’s tonearm was conceived, designed and realized by Joel, mostly in the machine shop of the UW Mechanical Engineering department, with resources and help from several departments including Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, the School of Music, the School of Art, the Business School and the School of Law, as well as the Center for Commercialization.

Oren Etzioni is the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in the UW Computer Science Department where he also directs the Turing Center, a multidisciplinary research center investigating problems at the crossroads of natural language processing, data mining, Web search, and the Semantic Web. His research interests include fundamental problems in the study of intelligence, web search, machine reading, and machine learning. Oren founded the start-up company Farecast, which was acquired by Microsoft’s Bing Travel in 2008. He was the Chief Technology Officer and a board member of Go2net (acquired by Infospace in 2000), and a co-founder of Netbot, acquired by Excite in 1997. At Netbot, Oren helped to conceive and design the web”s first major comparison-shopping agent. In 1995, Oren and his student Erik Selberg developed MetaCrawler, the web’s premier Meta-search engine for several years – now being run by Infospace. He is a co-founder of Clearforest, a text-mining startup (acquired by Reuters in 2007), and has served on the board of Performant (acquired by Mercury Interactive in 2003). Oren has served as a consultant or advisor to Google, Microsoft, Northern Telecom, SAIC, Infospace, Excite, Askjeeves, Zillow, Vivisimo, and others.

Vikram Jandhyala is professor and chair of electrical engineering at UW and director of the applied computational engineering lab. He is the founder and chairman of Nimbic, Inc (formerly Physware), a cloud-based electronic design automation and electromagnetic simulation startup. His research interests include several aspects of large-scale simulation, physics-based computing algorithms, and electronic design automation. He has published approximately 200 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He received his BTech EE from IIT Delhi in 1993, and his MS and PhD in EE from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995 and 1998, respectively. He developed electromagnetic boundary element solvers at Ansoft Corporation, Pittsburgh, from 1998-2000 prior to joining UW in 2000. Honors include an NSF CAREER award, Chair’s award and Outstanding Research Advisor award at UWEE, a NASA inventor award, and graduate research awards from IEEE and UIUC. His research at UW has been funded by DARPA, NSF, NASA, SRC, INTEL, WRF, DoD, Air Force, Navy, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, the SBIR program, and by several industrial grants.

Carla Grandori is a Research Associate Professor at UW where she serves as Director at the Quellos High Throughput Screening (HTS) Core. Carla also leads a laboratory in the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s Human Biology Division, where she focuses on identifying therapeutic targets for MYC-driven cancers, in particular neuroblastoma and ovarian cancers. As a cancer molecular and cellular biologist, she has been a pioneer in the application of genomic technologies and high throughput screening to identify new targets for cancer therapy. Carla trained as an M.D. but later decided to pursue a career in science to ultimately contribute to novel therapeutics. In 2006, Carla joined Rosetta Inpharmatics, a subsidy of Merck to exploit her expertise toward identifying new therapeutic cancer targets utilizing high throughput technology. The results of Carla’s research lead to several publications in major journals as well as inventions. Carla’s plan for the future is to foster the rapid discovery of new cancer therapeutics through new initiatives as well as through collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry.

Rodney J. Y. Ho is the Milo Gibaldi Endowed Professor of Pharmaceutics and Director of the DNA Sequencing and Gene Analysis Center at UW. Rodney has extensive experience in areas of neuropharmacology, lipid chemistry and translational medicine. He has written over 90 original research publications, 20 book chapters and two textbooks on drug delivery. Rodney’s research contributed to the development of the Pressurized Olfactory Delivery (POD) device, which helps deliver drug molecules beyond the blood-brain barrier and into the central nervous system. In 2008 Rodney founded Impel NeuroPharma, where he continues to chair their scientific advisory board. Rodney is also an inventor on six patents and numerous patent disclosures related to drug delivery and drug formulation.

Yoky Matsuoka is the Torode Family Endowed Career Development Professor for Computer Science & Engineering at UW. She works across multidisciplinary fields within science and engineering to understand, assist, and enhance human movement and sensing ability. Yoky is the principle investigator at the UW’s NSF Engineering Research Center: Sensorimotor Neural Engineering. She is also the director of the UW Neurobotics Laboratory. Her research combines neuroscience and robotics–sometimes referred to by Matsuoka by the portmanteau “neurobotics”–to create more realistic prosthetics. Yoky considers fundamental scientific questions while affecting and changing people in daily tasks. As a leader in the emerging field of neurobotics, Yoky is focused on creating robot technology that to help disabled persons. In 2009 Yoky founded Pine Hill Labs, an SBIR funded UW start-up that provides surgical appliances.

Buddy D. Ratner is the Michael L. and Myrna Darland Endowed Chair in Bioengineering and Professor of Chemical Engineering at UW. Buddy is a long-standing driving force for collaborations with industry. He directs the UWEB 21 corporate affiliate program, which brings together experts on hot topics and controversial subjects in biomaterials and medical devices. Buddy is one of the lead organizers and instructors in the University of Washington Program in Technology Commercialization (PTC). His research interests include biomaterials, tissue engineering, polymers, biocompatibility, surface analysis of organic materials, self-assembly, nanobiotechnology, and RF-plasma thin film deposition. Ratner has played a part in founding numerous startups including Asemblon, Healionics, Inson Medical Systems, and Calcionics.