SUMMARY OF 2001 COMPETITION - Metagenomics - The Soil Genome Project

 

Anca Maria Copaescu and Florentina Popovici won the $10,000 top prize in G. Steven Burrill Technology Business Plan Competition held on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus April 27. The team presented its business plan for Metagenomics—the Soil Genome Project to a panel of expert judges, faculty, students and professionals and walked away with the grand prize. The Copaescu and Popovici's business plan involves building "gene libraries" and a database by extracting and cloning DNA from the soil. Kopaescu is in the School of Business, Popovici is studying Computer Science.

Second prize of $7,000 went to Maria Kousathana and Chad Sorenson for TankMate™, an electronic system that allows the continuous monitoring of fluid levels with the field tank as well as the application rate per acre during fertilization. 

Mechanical engineering graduate student Chad Sorenson and business school partner Maria Kousathana won the $7,000 second prize as well as the $2,500 Tong Prototype Award. The team presented a plan for Fluent Solutions, a company that designs and markets aftermarket products to North American crop farmers. Its principal product is TankMateT™, an electronic system that allows farmers, from their tractor, to continuously monitor the fluid level in a field tank as well as the application rate per acre during fertilization.

Third prize went to the SMARTparts team and their product, Trail-A-Brake, a mechanical system designed to apply braking force to the wheel of a trailer bike. This team consisted of Christoph Heinzer, mechanical engineering, and Seth Werner, business. Werner was a first-prize winner in last year's competition.

Eric Dvorak and Justin Kolterman, biomedical engineering and Sharib Haroon, business took the Fourth prize of $1,000 for their business plan titled "The Radiologist." The team developed a remote positioning device for MRI-guided breast biopsy.

The annual Burrill technology business plan competition encourages interdisciplinary cooperation between students studying business and technology. Each competing team had at least one student with a scientific and/or engineering background and one with business expertise. This year, seven teams competed with commercial ideas ranging from procedures for improved MRI-guided breast biopsies to a display device that transmits pictures to instant messaging platforms.

The contest sponsor, G. Steven Burrill, gave the keynote speech on entrepreneurship and business creation. He is a 1966 alumnus of the business school, CEO and founder of Burrill & Company, San Francisco, and a well-known authority on life-sciences business development.

The judges for this year's event were: Jan Acker, President & CEO of Placon; Jan Eddy, President of Wingra Technologies; Scott Button, Partner of Venture Investors; and Robert Williams, Vice-president, Engineering, of Propelis. The competition was held at the Fluno Center on the UW-Madison campus.