OIPC Announces 2024 IDEA Award winners!

Great research innovations should be recognized and that’s what the IDEA Awards are all about!

The Innovative Disclosures and Entrepreneurial Activities (IDEA) Awards celebrates UAF’s and UAS’s best innovations, and it rewards their faculty, student, and staff inventors. The competition started in 2015, hosted by the University’s Office of Intellectual Property and Commercialization (OIPC).

The 2024 winners of the IDEA Awards disclosed innovative approaches to research, teaching and service and highlighted the diversity of innovations during the past fiscal year, 2023-2024.

This yearʼs winners are:

• Commercialization Award (best overall innovation): Dr. Doug Goering with “Structured Insulation for Abating Permafrost Thaw”
• Inspiration Award (best faculty innovation): Dr. Nima Farzadnia with “Thermochemically Activated Lunar Concrete”
• Creative Award (best staff innovation): Tav Ammu with “Gillnet Web Gauge”
• Alaska Impact Award (social impact): Dr. Michael Stekoll with “Floating and Hanging Kelp for Enhanced Yield in Kelp Mariculture”
• Tomorrow's Innovator Award (best graduate/postdoc innovation): Danielle Wrenn and Dr. Devin Drown with “Detection of Antimicrobial Resistance Toolkit for Remote Communities”
• Young Innovator Award (best undergraduate innovation): Sheridan Blasey, Lisa Jacklin, Daniel Kling, and Elizabeth Lee with “Musculoskeletal Assessment Device and System”

Next yearʼs competition is already underway, so enter here.

An in-person event to award certificates and highlight the achievements of this year's awardees will be held during EPSCoR’s IGNITE Workshop on Jan 8, 2025 in the Wood Center Ballroom. OIPC Interim Director, David Park, will be giving an overview of intellectual property protection and resources available to UAF innovators and industry professionals looking to work with them. The IDEA Award winners will speak about their innovations and be available for questions. Register for the event on the EPSCoR website.