Engineering faculty awarded Discovery to Product PRIME grants

Three Department of Mechanical Engineering faculty members have received funding from Discovery to Product’s (D2P) Piloting Research Innovation & Market Exploration (PRIME) grant program.

The PRIME funding will allow the faculty to undertake research to overcome critical market risk milestones, validate potential customer acceptance, and generate private and public funding.

The UW-Madison engineering faculty awarded funding by the PRIME program for fiscal year 2024 are:

Josh Roth (assistant professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Orthopedics & Rehabilitation) will further develop an orthopedic medical device for measuring ligament tension during knee replacement surgery to enable more personalized, direct and accurate measurements.

“I’m grateful for this funding to support the continued development and validation of our ligament tensiometer,” Roth says. His Ligometers team has participated in D2P’s Innovation to Market and Igniter cohorts and both the regional National Science Foundation (NSF) Medical Jumpstart I-Corps program and the national NSF I-Corps Program.

Lianyi Chen (Charles Ringrose associate professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering) will work to build and test an efficient powder spreadability testing system designed to qualify powders used in 3D printing. He will also evaluate the viability of commercialization of the test units and associated services.

Darryl Thelen (John Bollinger Chair of Mechanical Engineering & Bernard A. and Frances M. Weideman Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering) will develop an affordable, wearable sensor that can directly monitor muscle tendon loading to improve athletic performance assessment, evaluate injury, and track functional recovery during rehabilitation.

This is the second year of the PRIME grant program. Teams funded in the first year of the program have raised over $15 million in additional funding for the translation and commercialization of their technologies since being awarded PRIME funding.

Additional recipients of PRIME funding for fiscal year 2024 include Jonathan Eckhardt (professor, Management & Human Resources, Wisconsin School of Business; Discovery Fellow, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery) and Giulio Tononi (professor, Department of Psychiatry).

“I’m pleased we can offer this grant assistance in addition to D2P’s SEED and Draper-TIF grants,” says D2P interim director Abram Becker. “These PRIME grants will support teams across campus as they work to advance their projects’ commercialization journeys toward broader impact to advance the economy of the state of Wisconsin and beyond.”

A version of this story was originally published by Discovery to Product.

Image caption: D2P mentor Aimee Arnoldussen (left) with Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Josh Roth. Photo courtesy of Discovery to Product.