New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame Honors Four Members of Stevens Community

Hoboken, NJ, October 22, 2010 --(PR.com)-- Four members of the Stevens Institute of Technology community were honored at the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame Banquet, held Thursday, October 14. The awards honor those whose creativity, innovation, and invention contribute to economic growth and improve quality of life in New Jersey. As The Innovation University (™), Stevens dedication to research and entrepreneurship at all levels is evident, with a professor, two alumni, and a current student all receiving awards.

The honorees:

Dr. Vikki Hazelwood, Professor and Associate Program Director of Biomedical Engineering at Stevens, was awarded the Advancement of Invention Award. With 25 years of industry experience, Dr. Hazelwood’s award honors her accomplishments in bringing entrepreneurship into the educational process. She has worked with students to create a venture capital backed start-up company, as well as develop and improve life-saving technologies, with several patent filings and clinical trials in progress.

Dr. Nicolas Girard, who graduated with an M.S. from the Howe School of Technology Management in 2002, won an Inventor of the Year Award. He is Founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer at Attila Technologies whose breakthrough patented technology DPCC he invented and developed while a researcher at Stevens.

Dr. Xiaoling Chen, who graduated Stevens in 2010 with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, received a Graduate Student Award. Her research for her thesis, “Psycho-linguistic forensic analysis of Internet Text Data,” aimed to detect deception on the Internet through psycho-linguistic and text-mining approaches. This has resulted in a patent disclosure, filed in 2009.

Ms. Asli Ergun, a Ph.D. candidate in Chemical Engineering at Stevens, also received a Graduate Student Award for her work in tissue engineering at Stevens. Her work with Dr. Dilhan Kalyon, Institute Professor and Founding Director of the Highly Filled Materials Institute at Stevens, has resulted in two new methods of scaffold fabrication. She has obtained a provisional patent for the first and a second invention disclosure is forthcoming.

Since its founding, Stevens has been at the forefront of innovation and entrepreneurship. Its focus on Technogenesis® creates an environment in which new technologies are nurtured from concept to marketplace realization through the collaboration of students, faculty, and industry. To discover how Stevens is redefining the traditional university-industry technology transfer into Academic-Innovation-Transfer, visit the Office of Academic Entrepreneurship: http://www.stevens.edu/entrepreneurship/

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