'Double teams' for new materials technology
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| Founder and director of i-Teams, Amy Mokady |
Starting from next term, the students, industry mentors and researchers who collaborate to try to turn bright ideas into businesses will have the chance to reconvene on a subsequent i-Teams programme to further investigate the commercial viability of the technology.
It is hoped that the new development will not only increase the breadth and depth of the most promising i-Teams projects, but to an extent the quality, by bringing in students that have already graduated from the programme.
i-Teams is open to graduate students from any East of England university and the deadline for entry to the next programme (Easter Term) is midnight tonight (March 4th), so there is still time to sign up.
i-Teams founder and director, Amy Mokady told Cabume: “We decided that given how many of the teams continue working together beyond the end of i-Teams, it would be a good idea if we built that in to the programme itself. The aim is for projects to go to the next level in terms of detail - identifying and engaging with partners and working more in-depth on routes to market”.
The first project to be selected is potentially revolutionary materials research led by Dr Easan Sivaniah at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Lab. His team have used nanotech to develop porous materials, the physical characteristics of which can be finely controlled and the manufacture of which is easily transferable to existing industrial processes.
Potential applications range from dialysis to water purification to self-cleaning surfaces. Mokady said: “It has huge numbers of uses and could be quite disruptive in some of those”.
The team is being mentored by Julian White of Cambridge tech consultancy, Skalene.
While time is running out to get involved in the next i-Teams programme, the potential of the latest crop of ideas means that any one of them could be selected for the new ‘double teams’ treatment.
Cabume recently covered one of them, JustMilk, which is developing a modified nipple shield to prevent the transmission of mother to child during breastfeeding. The other projects for the Easter Term are: ‘Analysing screenplays, books, and online discussions’, ‘Influencing government policy through scientific research’ and ‘Investigating uses for a polymer "doorway" into living cells’.
i-Teams is taking part in the Cambridge Science Festival by organising a special i-Teams for children on Saturday March 26th. Children will be invited to find new uses for science based gadgets developed by Cambridge companies including ARM, SureFlap, Cambridge Temperature Concepts and Audio Analytic, with a prize awarded to the best idea.
