Brief Project Overview:

1. A Multinational Partnership to Incite Innovation via New Generation Tailored Polymers for Interfaces The University of Southern Mississippi The School of Polymers & High Performance Materials PI: Robert Y. Lochhead Co PIs: Cecil D. Burge, Joseph Graben, Sarah Morgan, Derek Patton NSF Award 0917730 3 Year Award Start Date: 8/01/09 Key Attributes of our Innovation Ecosystem: • Brief Project Overview: • A partnership has been established between the University of Southern Mississippi, Jones Junior College, 6 multinational corporations, and a cluster of small start-up companies. The objectives of the partnership are to: • Accelerate innovation by developing combinatorial techniques for polymer formulation • Educate a globally competent scientific workforce that is skilled in combinatorial techniques • Rapidly introduce new technologies by partnering with multinational companies • Gain access to commercial scale equipment for commercialization of new techologies • Questioning & Curiosity: • Can modern materials be developed more rapidly and efficiently by combinatorial robotic techniques and data-mining? • What are the rules for enhancing innovation via a partnership confining multinationals, entrepreneurs, university researchers and a small national lab? • How to prepare the scientific workforce of the future for. World of robotic experiments, informatics and knowledge networking? • How to translate all of this into economic benefit? Picture or Logo from your project here High throughput formulation comprises robotic preparation of complex mixtures and their analysis/characterization . The data is mined using informatics and it is displayed via visualization techniques for rapid comprehension • Risk Taking: • Initiative risks: • In this rapidly emerging field which robotic platforms to embrace? • Ensure that proper space was available for the robotics laboratory. • Interdependence Risks • To convince academic stakeholders of the need to include industrialists in the education of’ the scientific workforce • To convince industrialists that their intellectual property will not be compromised by this partnership. • Integrative Risks • Ensure that every partner contributes effort and receives benefits. Program Activities: Scigenesis Proof of Principle established and Phase II SBIR awarded. • Students were engaged in real projects with each of our partners. During the academic year, the students conducted research under the ‘tele-mentorship’ of industrial scientists. Each summer the students will continue their project as interns in the respective companies. The void left by the students leaving during summers will be filled by Local teachers, high school students and junior college students who will be exposed to basic education in materials formulation: • Develop new delivery systems for topicals based on stimuli-responsive polymer/surfactant interaction • With Procter & Gamble and Dow Chemical • Develop new stimuli-responsive polymer stabilizers for hydrophobic dispersions • With Glaxo Smith Kline • Develop New stimuli responsive systems from self-assembling block copolymers • With BASF • Develop Camouflage Face Paint with an appropriate spectral reflection in Near-IR to prevent ballistic heat burns • With Scigenesis (A start up company) • DoD SBIR Project Our PFI students won 1st, 2nd and 3rd place student poster awards at Waterborne Conference New Orleans-Feb 2010 and co-authored a patent review • Openness: • It is essential to be candid. • We admitted that we were “dead in the water“ when our robotic liquid handler crashed • P&G responded by donating a complete robotic liquid handling platform to the effort - with no strings attached! • GSK was delayed by the economy; BASF was delayed by a large acquisition. • We waited for them and they are both on board and taking student interns this summer. • Top Contributions/Outcomes : • 1.Interactive Projects involving students with top-level industrial scientists were established • Project teleconferences approximately every 2 weeks with all students and industrial partners • 2. A new high-throughput lab has been established in the new National Formulation Science Laboratory • Sophisticated robotics donated by our partner P&G • Microchannel Emulsification device donated by our new partner Velocys (Dublin, Ohio) • 3. All of our students have been placed as summer interns with our partner companies • We are preparing to “teach the teachers in our lab this summer • 4. One of our projects with a start-up– Scigenesis- proved the principle of heat reflecting camouflage facepaint and moved to Phase II SBIR with DoD Collaboration Across Fields: This partnership is all about merging robotics, information, chemistry and materials science with innovation hypotheses. Active Partners: Placing Partners in “New Environments” & “Playgrounds”: All of our students will intern in industry each summer. Community College instructors will intern’ in the high throughout laboratory. Next year industrialists will time-share in the high-throughput laboratory Top Challenges: 1. The National Formulation Lab, scheduled to open in Sept 2009, did not open until March 2010. Projects were conducted in shared space at the University 2. Due to the economic downturn, our partnership with Chemspeed (for access to their sophisticated robots) was delayed and has not yet materialized other partners stepped up to donate essential robotic equipment 3.Due to acquisitions Dow and BASF were late starters Leading/Inspiring of Surprising or Unexpected Results P&G and Velocys ‘saved’ us by equipment donation A new class of genetically engineered polysaccharides showed no benefit. Years of futile laboratory exploration were averted. SciGenesis . PFI . . National Science Foundation Partnerships For Innovation Grantee’s Meeting April 25-27, 2010 Arlington, VA