Colleges & Universities Nurture the Next Generation of Scientists/Entrepreneurs

From tiny nanotechnology to large-scale communications systems or biometrics, New Jersey's colleges and universities work to be at the head of the class in using and developing innovative technologies. Undergraduate and graduate students can pursue hands-on high-tech research and turn research-anddevelopment

Here's a review of some high-tech innovations occurring at the state's institutions of higher education:

Rowan University

Perhaps the state's newest university research park is at Rowan University, Glassboro, where ground was broken in April for the Innovation Center, the first building at the South Jersey Technology Park, located about a mile from the current campus.

The 45,000-square-foot laboratory and office building will house the university on the first floor, including engineering and science research and development labs, plus the Rowan Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, says Dr. Anthony Marchese, park director.

The second floor, with about 20,000 square feet of space available for lease, will feature wet labs and office space. "We're targeting technology-based companies to move in," Marchese says.

The Rowan Center already exists on the current campus. "It's basically a university center that focuses on entrepreneurship and innovation with respect to economic development in the region. It offers services to the community to, help entrepreneurs start their own businesses," Marchese explains. The center also offers services to faculty and students to give them business opportunities as an offshoot of their research.

"We focus a lot on our undergraduate students in engineering and business," Marchese explains. Rowan maintains a venture fund for undergraduates, providing money to about 30 students over the last five or six years.

One resulting company, started and owned by a Rowan graduate, manufactures retrofits for ski lifts to accommodate snowboards. Another installs photovoltaic solar cells for residential and commercial applicants. "They've actually been quite profitable because of the incentives that are available in New Jersey for that kind of thing," Marchese says.

A third student-founded company manufactures specialized automobile tail lights.

Rowan hopes to open the Innovation Center in time for the fall 2007 semester and anticipates constructing a new building at the approximately $15-million park every two years, Marchese says.

Rutgers University, Camden Campus

Businesses also grow at Rutgers' southernmost campus, which hosts a business incubator that later this year will move into the new Camden Waterfront Technology Center being built by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA). About 35 companies now in the incubator "receive the basic business incubation support, the business plan guidance and the financial guidance, the connections with venture capital," says Communications Director Mike Sepanic. "As much as possible, they receive technical support." The new center will add wet labs.

The incubator has hatched four businesses so far. The "poster child " says Sepanic, is CerionX, which produces laboratory technology in Pennsauken. It employs about 15 full-time employees and another 15 subcontractors and sells its products nationally.

Faculty and students, meanwhile, are involved in hightech research on campus.

"We've got some pretty active scholars who are doing very cool research in computer science," Sepanic says. One researcher, for example, is creating graphical passwords to provide greater computer security.

A NASA-funded project is studying ice worms. What's the relevance of such a project? The research "intends to not only look at how organisms survive in space, but how one might transport . . . biological materials with minimal deterioration," Sepanic says. An end result might be a better way to transplant organs from donors to recipients or improve methods for transporting and storing blood.

That project, Sepanic notes, is one of many examples of student involvement in research. "As a small campus ... we have to combine research and teaching opportunities, because it's the only way for us to really give our students that rich experience. Frankly, it's just a good idea. It's just a very good learning experience for the students."

Rutgers University, New Brunswick Campus

Students, especially at the graduate level, also are heavily involved in research at Rutgers' New Brunswick campus. Graduate students earn their degrees by working on research projects in laboratories, explains Dr. Michael Breton, associate vice president for research. "That educates the upper echelon of researchers for all of industry."

Research occurs in various ways. Rutgers is getting into nanotechnology, a big research area, through its Institute for Advanced Materials and Devices. Last spring, the university opened Rutgers Technology Centre II on Route 1, contiguous to the EDA's Technology Centre of New Jersey. Occupants include a wireless communications group called WINLAB and an energy storage research group that formerly worked within Telcordia.

The latter group has created batteries that store 2 1/2 times a normal battery's electrical charge. "They've created other technologies that are related to supercapacitors," Breton says. "They're like capacitors in that they charge up and discharge pretty quickly, but they're like batteries in that they store a lot more charge ... We're looking for applications for them now."

The university licenses patented technologies that result from research. About 10 percent of licensing activity results in business startups, Breton says. Startups doing well, he says, include: TyRx, which works with polymers to make medical-grade biodegradeable devices that can go into the human body; Phytomedics, which works with active botanicals; and Connotate, which has intelligent agents that search and monitor the Web.

The university also receives grants from companies $20 million last year - to do targeted research, Breton says.

"I think the university plays a critical role in creating new hightechnology-based companies," he says. "It may create them itself or it may help to catalyze their creation by supporting research that those companies eventually have access to. We're creating an environment that is supportive of development and growth of high-tech companies."

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)

NJIT, Newark, also supports business growth in various ways. Its business incubator has launched 63 businesses and has 45 companies in residence, with 310 employees and combined annual sales of about $15 million. Its Center for Manufacturing Systems helps small- and mid-sized companies solve manufacturing and design problems with services including computerassisted design, prototype development and better manufacturing processing techniques. NJIT's Polymer Processing Institute offers expertise in polymer processing to help industrial partners develop highperformance materials and products.

The level of research at the institute has grown from $15 million in 1994 to more than $74 million in 2004. As at other colleges and universities, students play an important role in this research. One place where it is taking place is at the newly formed Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center.

Funded by a five-year $4.75 million grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, the center supports research for rehabilitating people with disabilities. Institutions collaborating with the center are Children's Specialized Hospital in Mountainside; Rutgers-New Brunswick; and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark.

In one innovative project, biomedical engineers at NJIT will use new technology to help children with cerebral palsy improve their movements, reduce joint stiffness and live fuller, more independent lives. Engineers will employ technologies including small robots mounted on wheelchairs, interactive video games and a robotic arm that can be programmed to guide and aid human motion. Children's Specialized Hospital will be the clinical site for the research.

In another medical project, Professor Treena Arinzeh recently was honored by President Bush for research showing that adult stem cells can help patients suffering from spinal-cord injuries, bone and cartilage damage and related diseases.

In the law-enforcement arena, NJIT researchers are working to develop a "smart gun," designed to fire only when sensors in the handle recognize the owner's grip. NJIT also serves as the state's Homeland Security Technology Systems Center.

Stevens Institute of Technology

At Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, the key word is Technogenesis. "What it's about," says President Harold Raveche, "is the integration of education, research and creative inventiveness - with external partners, a very important clarification - so that the results of our faculty research do not end up just as a patent or even as an external license, but rather as tomorrow's products and services."

Rather than just licensing technologies, which is the prevailing academic model, he says, "we actually form companies with partners."

"We're about creating a new learning environment. We believe that's essential for the U.S. to compete in the world economy," he says. "We have to be more creative than the next guy. Seventy percent of the jobs in this country are created by small companies. Unless we feed that engine of creating new high-tech companies, we won't be able to compete in the world."

Recent examples of Stevens companies include Plasmasol, a medical sterilization company recently sold to Stryker, and Attila, founded after faculty and students invented a secure, specialized radio to help first responders communicate during a disaster.

SPOC, or Stevens Proof of Concept, is an almost exclusively student venture that enables a physician to precisely locate pain within a muscle group. "It's about to undergo clinical trials," Raveche says.

One faculty project shows how research can lead to very different technology applications.

"One of the fields I've worked in - and actually had started my own company based on my own technology is biometrics," says Dr. Helena Wisniewski, vice president of university research and enterprise development. This involves things like face recognition. "I had focused on physical access systems: You walk up to a door, and the door recognizes you and lets you in."

Wisniewski's daughter, then 10, suggested a new application. "What about a doll recognizing you as the owner?"

The scientist now is working with a major toy company to develop such a toy.

Monmouth University

At Monmouth University West Long Branch, finding ways to make connections is part of the research at the Center for Rapid Response Database Systems.

A $2-million congressional award established the center, which holds a U.S. Department of Defense contract, in August 2004. The goal is to: enable early identification of biological, chemical and radiological attacks; coordinate responses to attacks across local, state federal organizations; and to create a national rapidresponse model, explains Dr. Barbara Reagor, a Monmouth graduate who worked in industry for 34 years before becoming center director.

The center has embarked on several research projects and received two additional $1-million research grants. It initially focused on developing three system specifications. The first was for a disease diagnostic tool, Reagor says, so first responders would have a high-tech, low-cost, hand-held device to give them immediate information on whether they were looking, for example, at a case of smallpox. Second was a disease surveillance system, allowing one to monitor whether hospitals are getting an influx of people with a certain set of symptoms, for example, or if sales of certain over-the-counter drugs suddenly spike.

Third was an incident command system. "In this case, we're looking at taking very low-cost tools that can be used in a small town but could integrate all the way up to a national set of tools," Reagor says.

The center is working with Google Earth to find ways to develop software application layers that could provide 3D pictures on the Internet to show first responders a regional staging area identifying where police and fire fighters report and where entrances and exits are located. Researchers also are developing ways to use radio frequency identification to monitor who gets to a site and where they go - "sort of like putting an E-ZPass on an ambulance," Reagor says. "We can monitor in real time how our staging is being set up in order to respond rapidly to a disaster."