Winners Announced in 2009 Collegiate Inventors Comp...( CHICAGO Oct. 21 /- A faster tool for ...)

CHICAGO, Oct. 21 /PRNewswire/ -- A faster tool for cell programming and a new way of allowing quadriplegics to perform simple tasks have won grand prizes of the 2009 Collegiate Inventors Competition, a program of the National Inventors Hall of Fame sponsored by the Abbott Fund, the non-profit foundation of the global health care company Abbott, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Harris Wang, who invented a new way of cell programming at Harvard Medical School, and Stephen Diebold, who invented the Drop Point tool for quadriplegics while at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, each received a $25,000 prize during the Competition's culminating ceremony last night at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Graduate and undergraduate winners were also announced for their top work. Graduate winner Geoffrey von Maltzahn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won for his advances in nanomedicine to increase the effectiveness of cancer drugs, and the undergraduate team of Philip Wagner, Lindsay Holiday, and Dana Leland of Dartmouth College won for their electrocoagulation arsenic filter. As winners, von Maltzahn and the Dartmouth team each received a $15,000 prize from the competition.

All student entries were scrutinized during an initial evaluation process by over 20 experts from industry, government, and academic research who judged the entries on the originality of the idea and the potential value and usefulness of the invention to society. Then, on October 19th, nine chosen finalists presented their inventions to a final panel of seven judges, including five inductees from the National Inventors Hall of Fame and representatives from the USPTO and Abbott.

James West, a final phase judge and an inductee in the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his invention of the electret microphone, said, "Once again, we're impressed by the outstanding caliber of the student inventions.
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