Lab garners four tech transfer awards

Laboratory researchers and business development executives have garnered four technology transfer awards in the Federal Laboratory Consortium's Far West Region competition.

Lab scientists and engineers, in tandem with Industrial Partnerships Office (IPO) employees, captured two outstanding partnership awards and two outstanding technology development honors.

This year's awards will be presented during the Far West/Mid-Continent regional meeting, to be held Aug. 31-Sept. 2 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport Hotel in Burlingame.

During the meeting's second day, Sept. 1, panel discussions will focus on the federal technology landscape, energy partnerships and technology transfer opportunities.

Panelists scheduled for the morning session, entitled "New Beginnings — The Changing Federal Technology Landscape," include Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, LLNL's acting Science and Technology principal associate director; Yvonne Pendleton of the NASA Ames Research Center; and Cheryl Fragiadakis, of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (LBNL) technology transfer office. The panel will be moderated by IPO's Erik Stenehjem.

One of the Laboratory's two outstanding partnership awards went to a team of LLNL scientists and engineers, led by Morgan Burks, that developed GeMini, a portable gamma-ray spectrometer based on germanium technology.

Small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, this spectrometer is equipped with an innovative low-powered, miniature cooling mechanism.

GeMini was launched on NASA's Mercury MESSENGER spacecraft and is now taking the first-ever gamma-ray data of the planet Mercury. GeMini also can be used to help prevent the smuggling of nuclear materials and can assist in the implementation of international safeguards for nuclear fuel cycles. This work was supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the National Nuclear Security Administration's Office of Dismantlement and Transparency to advance the Next Generation Safeguards Initiative.

An Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based company, Nucsafe Inc., has licensed the GeMini technology. Catherine Elizondo has been the IPO's business development executive for this project.

The second LLNL outstanding partnership award was received for the large area imager, a radiation detection technology that assists in locating illegal nuclear materials.

LLNL researchers, including Simon Labov and Karl Nelson, worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Science Applications International Corp. through funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to deliver a commercial prototype.

Among the large area imager's superior features are: unprecedented sensitivity to weak sources, a minimum five-fold increase in searching range and a 25-fold speed up in search time. Elizondo also has served as IPO's business development executive for this effort.

The Advanced Vision Systems for Minimally-Invasive Surgeries project received one of LLNL's two Far West Region awards for outstanding technology development.

This effort, by LLNL physicist Stavros Demos, whose project is part of the Laboratory's collaboration with the UC Davis Cancer Center, provides surgeons with a real-time view of the critical tissue structure during gallbladder surgery.

The technology seeks to reduce the number of injuries, such as the inadvertent cutting of the common bile duct, that occur during surgery by becoming the standard of care for minimally-invasive surgeries. Genaro Mempin is IPO's business development executive for this project.

The Laboratory's other award for outstanding technology development was garnered by LLNL researchers who have been developing carbon nanotubes for water desalination and filtration.

During their research, the Lab team found the carbon nanotube membranes demonstrated permeability that is significantly higher than conventional membranes, despite having smaller pore sizes.

The new technology offers several potential advantages over existing water filtration technology. Because of the very narrow pores (1-2 nanometers), it can potentially filter out both chemicals and biological organisms (bacteria and viruses). In addition, due to the technology's extraordinarily large water permeability, it is expected that less energy would be needed than for conventional reverse osmosis membranes for water desalination.

Members of the LLNL research team are Olgica Bakajin, Aleksandr Noy, Jason Holt, Hyung Gyu Park and Francesco Fornaseiro. IPO's Ida Shum is the project's business development executive.

Started in 1974, the FLC assists the U.S. public and private sectors in utilizing technologies developed by federal government research laboratories.

The FLC Far West is one of six regions covering the United States. The Far West Region is comprised of eight western states — Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. There are more than 100 federal laboratories and facilities in the Far West Region.

This year's FLC regional conference is being jointly hosted by LLNL, LBNL and the NASA Ames Research Center.