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The Indiana Daily Student

Seven IU faculty receive more than $160K in grant money

The Johnson Center for Innovation and Translational Research awarded more than $160,000 in grants to seven researchers at IU-Bloomington through the Translational Research Pilot Grant program.

The Johnson Center collaborates with faculty and researchers throughout the IU-Bloomington campus to find discoveries that have commercial potential. Two of the researchers awarded are Kylie Peppler from the School of Education and Michael Wade from the Department of Biology. They received $24,882 and $25,000, respectively. Peppler and Wade are part of a team. The grant money goes to both the researchers and their teams.

“The team — Joshua Danish, Armin Moczek and me — created a positioning system similar to GPS that calculates physical distances from a captured wireless signal’s round-trip time,” Peppler said in a press release. “It is intended for indoor environments where GPS does not work well. Our system will be able to track a person’s 2-D or 3-D position in real time with excellent updating frequency, while supporting multiple tracking objects in a large area. The software then maps all of the tags’ locations onto an animated webpage in real time.”

The Translational Research Pilot Grant program funds the completion of proof-of-concept projects that will support the advancement of translational research projects with business partners and the formation of new companies, according to an IU press release.

“We will use the funds primarily for the personnel doing the lab work and for the materials needed for the molecular work,” Wade said. “If we are able to show that the process works as we imagine it does (as our mathematical models suggest), then we will have something that could suppress the populations of crop pests or disease vectoring insects without the use of pesticides. This would be a better, safer and more efficient method than those currently used.”

In the program’s second year there has been growth said Keith R. Davis, director of the Johnson Center, in the press release. Five faculty members received $104,230 in 2015.

“It was not difficult to seek the support of the Johnson Center once we had the idea — the director, Keith Davis, has great experience in lab-to-commercial product development and his advice and criticism helped shape our final project,” Wade said.

Submitted projects were built on findings that had been disclosed to the IU Research and Technology Corp. Individual project budgets up to $25,000 were considered.

“Our team — Gabe Zentner, Doug Drury, Dylan Siniard and me — has developed a safe new method for reducing the population size of crop pests, like the western corn rootworm, and disease-vectoring insects, like the mosquitoes carrying Zika virus,” Wade saidin a press release. “With the Johnson Center award, we will demonstrate proof of concept in laboratory populations and then use that evidence to attract venture capital to our project.”

The Johnson Center for Innovation and Translational Research plans to accept applications for the next selection of grants in February, with a submission deadline of April 1, 2017, and recipients funded by June 1, 2017.

Leo Smith

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