News of January 23, 2024
Plenty of Innovation at HZDR Transfer Day
Awarding the winners of the 7th HZDR Innovation Contest
A project from the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) has emerged victorious in the Innovation Contest 2023 of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR). The technology named XR (extended Reality)-Microscopy aims to improve existing microscopes, thereby creating numerous possibilities for application in basic and applied research. The idea proposed by CASUS scientists Dr. Ulrik Günther and Jan Tiemann prevailed among 15 submissions. The winners received a certificate and prize money of 1,500 euros at the HZDR Transfer Day on January 23, 2024.
To conclude the Transfer Day, the HZDR Board of Directors presented certificates for the most innovative ideas. From left: Dr. Diana Stiller (Administrative Director), Jan Tiemann, Dr. Ulrik Günther, Shalani Singh, Dr. Rohan Jain, Uwe Pöpping (standing in for Ivan Condriuc) and Prof. Sebastian M. Schmidt (Scientific Director).
Source: HZDR
The HZDR Innovation Contest has established itself as a successful instrument to scout ideas for the technology transfer to industry and society. Since 2017, HZDR has been inviting its researchers to take part in the competition. This year’s second place went to Ivan Condriuc from the HZDR Institute of Fluid Dynamics with his idea for a gas-liquid swirl separator for the production of green hydrogen. Third place was awarded to Dr. Rohan Jain from the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology, along with his colleagues Aratrika Ghosh and Shalini Singh for their project "Siderosensor", a biosensor for measuring the metal content in industrial wastewater from the semiconductor industry. The award ceremony took place on January 23 as part of the HZDR Transfer Day, an event highlighting the progress, the achievements and challenges of technology transfer at HZDR for the first time.
Around 100 HZDR scientists and partners from transfer centers at other universities and Helmholtz centers took part in the event, which was kicked off by a keynote from Prof. Frank Buchholz, Head of Medical Systems Biology at TU Dresden, and Dr. Anne-Kristin Heninger, Foundress and Managing Director of Seamless Therapeutics. In 2023 Buchholz was honored with the title "Unipreneur" by Bettina Stark-Watzinger, Federal Minister of Education and Research, for his commitment to driving ideas forward from science towards start-ups, a feat he has successfully accomplished three times.
"I am curious to see if the winners of the HZDR Innovation Contest 2023 will once again be spin-offs," stated Dr. Björn Wolf, Head of the Technology Transfer and Innovation Department at HZDR and jury member, at the opening of the Transfer Day.
A total of 15 commercialization ideas were presented to a five-member jury at the 7th HZDR Innovation Contest in early December 2023. In workshops, the teams, each supervised by a mentor, spent a day developing a seven-minute presentation on technology, market potential and the competitive situation, which they presented at the end. "Since 2017, the competition has enabled us to identify more than 100 application-oriented ideas and open up new career prospects for many scientists at the HZDR through the various transfer paths," concluded Björn Wolf.
Further information:
Dr. Björn Wolf
Head of Technology Transfer & Innovation Department at HZDR
Email: b.wolf@hzdr.de
