Objectives
- Cultivating Innovation: Encouraging a culture of innovation among students through seed funding and resources for design projects.
- Stimulating Technology Transfer: Supporting the conversion of academic research into viable commercial ventures.
- Promoting Entrepreneurship: Facilitating the growth of start-up companies emerging from the university.
Benefits
- Financial Support: Seed funding for student projects and start-up ventures.
- Resource Access: Technology transfer and access to commercialization support.
- Skill Development: Encouraging entrepreneurial skills and innovation among students.
- Mentorship: Engage with successful entrepreneurs, investors, and mentors invested in your success.
Success Stories
Timothy Arcari, a graduate student in the joint B.S./M.S. program in Biomedical Engineering (BME), and Joseph Cherubin, a senior BME major, created HemoFix, an automated tourniquet that anyone can use in an emergency. Traditional manual tourniquets require significant strength to work correctly have a high failure rate, and surgical tourniquets are expensive and immobile. Arcari and Cherubin’s portable smart tourniquet employs compressed air cartridges so that anyone, regardless of age or fitness, can stanch bleeding in an emergency. They got the idea from Miller School students who identified the problem, and their goal is straightforward: to save as many lives as possible. Arcari and Cherubin wholeheartedly credit the support of Dr. Rajguru and other faculty, mentoring teams, and donors at the U that enabled them to improve and test their prototype, refine their business model, enter competitions such as eMerge Americas, and move their concept toward marketability. “We are tremendously grateful for all the resources UM has provided us, and we can’t wait to see how far we can take this valuable product in years to come,” Arcari said.
Joy Jackson, Kailyn Nuñez, and Erin Ravindran, all 2023 Biomedical Engineering graduates, created the PrepAir Patch, a noninvasive, minimalistic way to detect the respiratory rate of premature infants in a neonatal intensive care unit. “As student entrepreneurs, having the guidance of professors and faculty is an incredible asset,” Ravindran said. “This support grants us the flexibility to think beyond monetary limits. The senior design classes and expo have served as an invaluable experience in learning, start to end, what it means to be innovators.”
USTAAR will broaden these opportunities to reach all corners of the University, where students apply their learning and creativity to devise marketable products that can make a difference beyond campus.
