The Florida High Tech Corridor Early-Stage Innovation Fund announces second round of awards for applied research at USF
USF Research & Innovation and the Florida High Tech Corridor are partnering to provide $75,000 to support the advancement of technologies developed by USF researchers. The second round of seed funding will support three projects from across the university:
- An advanced atomic clock with critical applications in defense, navigation, automotive, and other key sectors
- A novel process to transform food and gas waste to the building blocks of plastics and rubber
- A promising therapeutic to prevent early risk factors of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias
The awarded projects below are led by faculty from the College of Engineering, College of Arts & Science, and Morsani College of Medicine.
Denis Karaiskaj: Silicon Based Chip Size Atomic Clocks
College of Arts & Sciences, Dept. of Physics
Atomic clock devices are very precise time keeping units that far exceed the accuracy of conventional clocks. They have critical applications in defense, navigation, automotive, and other key sectors. Current atomic clocks utilize the properties of atomic gases to function. The goal of this project is to refine and build a prototype clock based on impurity atoms that naturally occur in silicon. A silicon-based clock would lead to much smaller and lighter clock devices, which consume less power and are more easily integrated in existing electronics. This technology would have the potential to replace the existing technology for chip-scale atomic clocks.
John Kuhn: Low Cost Heterogeneous Catalysts for Light Olefin Production via Waste Streams
College of Engineering, Dept. of Chemical, Biological, and Materials Engineering
Light olefins, like ethylene and propylene, are the building blocks to many common materials in today's world including plastics and rubber. These building blocks are currently produced almost exclusively from fossils fuels like natural gas and crude oil resulting in a high CO2 footprint. As the US moves toward its long-term carbon reduction goals, decarbonizing the industrial and manufacturing sectors is key. In this project, the team aims to produce these building blocks from waste materials such as food waste and effluent waste gases rather than fossil fuels. This project will build on promising preliminary results to redesign currently established industrial reactions making them climate-sustainable while maintaining the necessary quality of the output materials.
