 The Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute's (Mtech's) Maryland Industrial Partnerships Program awarded $3.7 million to 16 teams of Maryland companies and faculty members developing commercially promising technology products. Funding supports research in the laboratories of participating University System of Maryland faculty, who work closely with partner companies to advance their products. All funding goes to the faculty members conducting the research and development on company products. The projects, which span the state of Maryland, include a new biofuel-producing scrubber to remove CO2 from smokestacks, biofouling screen systems that remove harmful nutrients and sediment from the Chesapeake Bay, a variable-torque wind turbine with a speed converter, pest-resistant soybeans, ultra-thin rechargeable batteries, a system that speeds Internet-via-satellite communications and more.
 PolyVec Systems, a startup company co-founded by Fischell Department of Bioengineering (BioE) professor Peter Kofinas and graduate student Irene Bacalocostantis (pictured), won $45,000 in three categories at the University of Maryland's 11th annual $75K Business Plan Competition, organized by Mtech. PolyVec Systems won $25,000 and the Lockheed Martin Grand Prize in the High Technology & Biotechnology division for their development of a synthetic polymer carrier that delivers therapeutic genes directly to breast cancer cells. The company also won the $10,000 Maryland Biotechnology Center Best Biotechnology Company prize, and a second place, $10,000 Warren Citrin Social Impact Award. Advanced Suture Device for Scarless Wound Healing won first place and $10,000 in the undergraduate category. The company, whose team is comprised of mechanical engineering undergraduate student Jin Xiao, economics major Sharon Liu and Yang Tao, biological resources engineering professor and director of the Bio-imaging and Machine Vision Laboratory, is developing a novel wound closure device that does not leave scars.
 Clark School teams won three out of four top prizes in the 2011 UM Office of Technology Commercialization's Invention of the Year Awards. Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor K. J. Ray Liu (pictured) and his team won in the Information Science category for their "Active Sensing for Dynamic Spectrum Access" project, a novel fingerprinting method to authenticate and classify wireless transmissions, which prevents wasteful processing of unintended transmissions and permits nodes to quickly authenticate legitimate users and recognize unauthorized users. BioE Assistant Professor Silvia Muro won one of two prizes in the Life Science category for "Targeted Carriers for Drug Delivery across the Gastrointestinal Epithelium," which describes a novel strategy to use the gastrointestinal (GI) trans-epithelial pathway to provide the transfer of orally administered molecules. This technology safely and effectively targets the GI epithelial cells for speedy transport across the GI cell body with no negative effect on the GI permeability. Oral drug delivery means less discomfort for patients. A team consisting of Materials Science and Engineering's Ichiro Takeuchi, Jun Cui, Manfred Wuttig and Yiming Wu won in the Physical Sciences category for "Thermoelastic Cooling." This novel cooling technology based upon thermoelastic shape memory metal alloys will contribute to U.S. energy consumption reduction goals.
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