The second Innovation to Impact symposium took place April 30 as part of Binghamton University's annual Research Days. It celebrated the accomplishments of Binghamton faculty inventors and innovators, featuring panels highlighting the region's resources and commercialization opportunities, as well as a presentation from keynote speaker John Rogers, director of the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics at Northwestern University.
Rogers' talk was held in conjunction with the Smart Energy Symposium and a poster session run by the Materials Research Society. With over 100 patents and applications under his belt and more than 221,000 citations on Google Scholar, Rogers saw intersections between his own bioelectronic technologies and Binghamton's work in energy storage innovation.
"I think many faculty would like to see the results of their academic research terminate not just in papers that go into journals, but technologies that can benefit humanity," he said.
In the case of academic research, which is often funded by taxpayer dollars, Rogers believes that educating future generations of students is an important way to pay back that investment, but not the only avenue.
"At least from my perspective, we kind of owe it to the taxpayers to look for opportunities to get things out of the lab and into the real world - and then there's the potential for doing societal good with that kind of activity," he said. "We're not just talking, in many cases, about consumer gadgetry, but healthcare-related devices, or devices that could provide renewable sources of energy, and different things like that."
Entrepreneurship has been growing steadily at Binghamton, with a significant increase in invention disclosures and patent filings over the years. This year, for example, the number of patent applications filed jumped from 32 to 44.
The NSF Accelerating Research Translation award funds Binghamton's Excellence in Entrepreneurship and Discovery (EXCEED) program, which nurtures faculty at every stage of the research translation process with funding, support and training.
"Faculty are basically entrepreneurs. They run labs - startups. They hire people to work in them. They're focused on an idea and solving a problem. They have to convince people that the problem is important enough to get grant funding. Then they go out and share this idea and try to scale and collaborate with other people to increase the impact," said Kathryn Cherny, senior program manager at the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships. "That's basically what entrepreneurs and startup founders do: They see a problem, they convince people it's important, they get money and they try to scale and sustain impact."
This year, 19 Binghamton faculty members were honored in a ceremony during the symposium for their patents received in 2024. Their works ranged from improved energy storage technology and new 3D printing techniques to novel methods for human-robot collaborations.
A few professors achieved multiple patents in the same year, such as Distinguished Professor Kanad Ghose for his work on wearable smart patches and data center cooling (co-invented with Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research), or Nobel laureate M. Stanley Whittingham for his work on vanadyl phosphate cathodes applicable to both sodium and lithium battery chemistries.
Inventor Honorees
Brian Callahan
Umur Ciftci
Pritam Das
Kanad Ghose
Kartik Gopalan
Sha Jin
Alistair Lees
Ronald Miles
Alex Nikulin
Bahgat Sammakia
Scott Schiffres
Shahrzad Towfighian
M. Stanley Whittingham
Ping Yang
Kaiming Ye
Lijun Yin
Shiqi Zhang
Zhongfei Zhang
Chuan-Jian Zhong
The act of invention is challenging in itself, even more so when balancing that work with educating students, Rogers said.
"It's almost kind of like a moral obligation to do it - beyond the dollars and cents around taxpayers, and beyond the mentorship aspects," he said. "When your career is over, and you're talking to your grandkids, do you want to just point to a bunch of journal articles, or do you want to be able to hand them a product that came as a result of your work?"
Rogers' advice to academics who are looking to dip their toes into the startup world is to mature their technology and ideas as long as possible in the lab, before moving on to launch, as well as remain practical.
As for the future of entrepreneurship, he remains optimistic.
"Not everybody needs to do it, but enough people that you can have those success stories," he said. "Then I think it provides massive motivation for additional funding to support the basic research that's happening in the academic lab."
Discussions on the importance of commercialization continued throughout the afternoon, with panels including leaders from the Research Foundation for SUNY, the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator and Columbia Technology Ventures, the latter also being Binghamton's mentor institution through EXCEED.
"There's a lot of innovation going on on campus, but for some reason, faculty don't see themselves as entrepreneurship, founders, or their research as translational. But they're doing amazing research that addresses real-world problems," Cherny said. "I hope faculty who came to the symposium start to look at their research differently, and that it allows for more conversation and opportunity for us to support these new innovators across campus."
