Kentucky Commercialization Ventures (KCV) has announced the winners of its first-ever IMPACT competition.
IMPACT, which is an acronym for "Innovative Mobile, Public Health, and Community-Oriented Technologies," aims to encourage ideation relevant to the improvement of the social, health or economic conditions and highlight the value of innovators from across the state of Kentucky.
To be eligible, applicants had to be affiliated with a KCV partner institution as faculty, staff or a student, which includes Eastern Kentucky University, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University and Western Kentucky University. Submissions were judged by a panel of reviewers from across the state.
The competition awarded a total of $86,000 to six Kentucky innovators.
Two first-place winners, Dr. Rachel Tinius and Dr. Daniel Boamah, both of Western Kentucky University, received a $25,000 award to further their innovations.
Tinius's innovation, BumptUp, is an evidence-based digital technology solution created to improve physical activity and health outcomes among pregnant and postpartum women. Boamah's project is developing a multi-tenant mixed/virtual reality platform for increasing awareness of implicit bias in child welfare decision-making.
You can read more about both of those innovations, and the other award-winning projects and their collaborators, here.
The runner-ups in the inaugural IMPACT competition each received $9,000. They are:
- Dr. Nicholas Caporusso, Northern Kentucky University, for Cursor, developing next-generation eye-tracking solutions.
- Dr. Kouroush Jenab, Morehead State University, for virtual reality STEM and workforce training platforms.
- Dr. Jamie Fredericks, Eastern Kentucky University, for a sample collection tool for rapid DNA analysis.
- Dr. Christopher Lennon, Murray State University, for the engineering of a novel self-cleaving intein tag for protein purification.
