May 18, 2010

Immediate Release

USPTO Co-Sponsors Collegiate Inventors Competition Seeking Inventive Entries From Students

Program recognizes students for their innovative work and awards cash prizes
 

The Invent Now Collegiate Inventors Competition, now in its 19th year, is inviting inventive students to enter its 2010 competition.

The Collegiate Inventors Competition is designed to recognize and honor student innovators at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Since 1990, the Competition has honored numerous individuals and teams for their outstanding inventive contributions and innovative research. This year, nearly $80,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to the winning undergraduate and graduate students and advisors at a special awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. in the fall.  The Competition is sponsored by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the Abbott Fund.

 The deadline for entering this year’s Competition is June 25, 2010.  Entries are judged on originality of the idea, process or technology, and their potential value and usefulness to society. 

 Collegiate Inventors Competition winners from 2009 included a team from Dartmouth who developed a device to filter arsenic from drinking water in third world nations, Geoffrey von Maltzahn from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  who created nanoparticles that communicate with each other to more effectively target therapy to tumors, Stephen Diebold from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who invented a tool to facilitate independence for quadriplegics, and Harris Wang from Harvard, whose Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering, or MAGE, is an efficient way for faster cell programming, perhaps resulting in manufactured microorganisms.  

 Competition judges select 10-12 finalists who receive an all-expense paid trip to the final judging round and awards ceremony. National Inventors Hall of Fame Inductees participate in the final round of judging, and past judges have included individuals such as Don Keck, inventor of optical fiber for communications; George Smith, 2009 Nobel Prize recipient and inventor of the charge-coupled device; and James West, inventor of the electret microphone.

 Entry forms and more information on the program are available at www.invent.org/collegiate.

# # #