The goal of the Industrial Fellows program is to bring industrial and university scientists and engineers together in a collaborative interaction for an extended period. This program structure provides the opportunity to formulate and implement long-term, non-proprietary research projects of mutual interest and encourages the exchange of new insights, ideas, and knowledge. Companies with UWAMIC contract may enroll one Fellow per year as part of their membership fees. Small business member companies may enroll Fellows for an additional fee, or under a contract research program. While in residence at the University, a designated employee works closely with UWAMIC researchers on a pre-defined research project of mutual interest. To encourage Industrial Fellows and UWAMIC faculty to have a true interactive research, the program allows for a flexible schedule and period of residency ranging from 10 days to three months. However, to ensure a meaningful collaboration, the 10 days should be scheduled within a year.
How to Become an Industrial Fellow
The prospective Fellow works with the UWAMIC faculty member who will be directly associated with the project to develop a one- to two-page proposal describing the nature of the research and the estimated amount of time to be spent in residence. The Fellow, faculty member and UWAMIC Director sign this proposal and forward it to university for final approval.
Past Fellows
Connie Lebakken
During her Industrial Fellowship Dr. Lebakken will work to advance two technology platforms at Stem Pharm; a materials-based transfection technology and a synthetic hydrogel platform, both originally invented in Prof. Murphy’s laboratory and licensed from WARF. Stem Pharm recently received an NIH SBIR to study the transfection technologies use for delivery of mRNA transcripts for cellular reprogramming applications. Dr. Lebakken will also work to further develop Stem Pharm’s hydrogel technologies, with a materials focus on generating hydrogel coatings on the surface of tissue-culture plasticware and microcarriers for cell expansion of therapeutically relevant cell types.
Marco Bedolla
Dr. Bedolla is the Product Development Engineer at Platypus Technologies and is an expert on liquid crystal sensors and polymer characterization. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biological Engineering from UW Madison.
Ty Prosa
Dr Prosa is a senior scientist at Cameca as well as the manager of the applications laboratory at Cameca for the local electron atom probe. He has been and remains closely involved with bringing the atom probe at the UW Madison Materials Science Center (MSC) to the state of the art. He is also the main contact for members of the MSC and has participated in numerous training seminars as well as development of the atom probe facility. He received his Ph.D. in Experimental and condensed matter physics from UW Madison.
David Larson
Dr. Larson is the Director of Scientific Marketing at Cameca and served as vice president of applications research for the local electron atom probe. He previously served as a senior director at Imago Instruments. Prior to joining Imago (now Cameca), he worked at Seagate Technologies and did his post doctoral work at Oxford University. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science at UW Madison.
Tyler Nelson
Imbed Biosciences Inc. (“Imbed”) is a privately held medical device company developing novel and patent pending technologies for embedding bioactive molecules in wound dressings and surgical implants. By leveraging its novel biomaterials platforms, Imbed is revolutionizing wound dressings to prevent wound infections and expedite wound closure, and ideally reduce the overall cost of managing surgical and chronic wounds, a $3 billion market opportunity in the US and Europe. Imbed is a spinoff from University of Wisconsin-Madison based on 4 years of research by a multidisciplinary group of engineers, veterinary scientists and medical surgeons. Collectively, the founders bring more than 25 years of experience in clinical wound management.
Dr. Steven Goodman
Microscopy Innovations, LLC is a life science tools company founded in 2007 to create novel products for microscopy laboratories.Microscopy Innovations’ mPrep product line offers significant improvements in specimen preparation, handling and storage. Current products are used primarily in electron microscopy. Future product development will extend the technology into light microscopy applications.
Dr. Koichi Nishikida
SpectroSolutions LLC was founded by Koichi Nishikida, who has been an IR specialist for PerkinElmer Corporation, PerkinElmer Instruments, Thermo SpectraTech, Thermo Nicolet and Thermo Fisher Scientific for 31 years. He has authored in 10 books in Infrared Raman spectroscopy. He is the recipient of the 1997 Gold Medal from New York section of Society for applied Spectroscopy because of his important contributions to digital age spectroscopy. He has also served as a panelist of NSF funding.