von Liebig Center in the UT San Diego

Great story about the von Liebig Center in the UT San Diego this week.

Innovation is the engine of the economy, and UC San Diego is turbocharging the RPMs. That’s why the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center was formed 10 years ago in the Jacobs School of Engineering. The center offers classes, mentorship and grants to all graduate students at UC San Diego, and it also has collaborations with other universities in the region. It has a satellite office at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and works closely with the UC San Diego Medical School and the Rady School of Management.

 The story is part of the "I'm There for You, Baby" series by Neil Senturia and Barbara Bry, serial entrepreneurs who invest in early-stage technology companies. The weekly column is about entrepreneurship in San Diego.

Meet the Founders and CEOs of Biological Dynamics, Cognionics, App2you and EarthRisk Technologies

Meet the Founders and CEOs of Biological Dynamics, Cognionics, App2you and EarthRisk Technologies TODAY at a Technology and Student Showcase, part of the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Learn how inventions are commercialized.

Meet the founders and entrepreneurs that have launched  4 exciting technology companies.
Hear how they are bringing new innovations to the market and the role of the von Liebig Center in the
transition out of the laboratory. 

RSVP

When: Wednesday, January 18, 2012

5:00 - 7:00 p.m.

Where: Qualcomm Conference Center
at the Jacobs School of Engineering
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California

Inquiries: vonliebigcontact@soe.ucsd.edu or 858-822-1435

von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center

From the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

"In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm.

In the real world all rests on perseverance."

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center / CONNECT

CONNECT has a story about the recent "Innovation 101" series entitled "Technology and Innovation in Proof of Concept Centers: Accelerating the Commercialization of University Innovation".  The story includes Dr. Rosibel Ochoa, Director of the von Liebig Center at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.

Read the story on the CONNECT Web site, in the Policy eNEWS archive.

Commercializing Silicon on Sapphire

Commercializing Silicon on Sapphire

Friday, Oct. 7, 2011

11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Jacobs Hall, Lobby

Qualcomm Conference Suite

Ron Reedy, Ph.D., UCSD ’83

Co-Founder and CTO, Peregrine Semiconductor

Silicon on Sapphire, SOS, was invented in 1963 by Hal Manasevit, blessed with incredible technical merit and cursed with seemingly insurmountable manufacturing issues. For the next 3 decades, SOS morphed from a child prodigy to an aged has-been on death’s doorstep. Only a small, dedicated group of Government researchers kept it alive long enough to see its killer application arrive: commercial, high-volume mobile wireless communications.

In 1990 Peregrine Semiconductor was founded on the premise that cellular phones would require integrated RF solutions just as personal computers required integrated digital solutions. Driven by integration and cost, a CMOS solution would dominate this opportunity and a CMOS technology on an RF (insulating) substrate would be the ideal solution.

Twenty years later, Peregrine is an overnight success and about to ship our billionth CMOS on sapphire RFIC. In this presentation, the history of technical, product, business and financial hurdles will be discussed. If you don’t want to be an entrepreneur when we are done, I will have failed.

This event is being presented by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

BIOGRAPHY:  Ronald E. Reedy, Ph.D., a Peregrine co-founder, serves as Chief Technical Officer. Dr. Reedy, who has more than 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, co-founded Peregrine in 1990. Previously, he was the branch head of the microelectronics division at Navy Research and Development Center (NRaD). He is responsible for expanding capabilities and usage of Peregrine’s UltraCMOS™ technology.

            Dr. Reedy is credited as one of the inventors of Peregrine's patented UltraCMOS technology. He has over thirty five years of experience in silicon on insulator and silicon on sapphire research, manufacturing and product development. He holds a BSEE degree from the U.S. Naval Academy, an MSEE from US Naval Postgraduate School. In 1983 he received a Ph.D. in Applied Physics/EE from University of California at San Diego based on pioneering work in monolithic integration of optical and electronic components. Dr. Reedy is co-recipient of 2011 IEEE Daniel E. Noble Award for Emerging Technologies (the other co-recipient, Dr. Mark Burgener is also a UCSD alum). Dr. Reedy has published dozens of technical articles and is an author on over thirty patents, all related to microelectronics or electro-optics. He has been a presenter or invited speaker at dozens of technical and financial conferences.

Hosted by Professor Paul Yu

von Liebig Center helps San Diego Win $1M Clean Tech Grant

A quote from the KPBS story by Padma Nagappan:

“The focus of the grant is on energy technologies. For example, next generation batteries, new materials for cheaper solar panels or new ways for generating hydrogen,” said Rosibel Ochoa, the UCSD grant coordinator. (Ochoa is the executive director of the William J. von Liebig Center at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering).

Cross-Border Regional Entrepreneurism and Technology Alliance

UC San Diego is partnering with Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (UABC) in a research and education program designed to stimulate technology commercialization and economic development in the Southern California-Baja California region. Under the partnership, UC San Diego’s top-ranked Jacobs School of Engineering and its William J. von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement will work with UABC’s highly regarded Institute of Engineering and the Center for Technology Development and Transfer to form a crossborder regional entrepreneurism and technology alliance called “CREATE.”

Read more the Jacobs School news site: cross-border regional entrepreneurism and technology alliance.



From L to R, Eugenio Clariond Reyes-Retana, CEO of Verzatec and a member of the Council of Advisors for the Jacobs School of Engineering; Rosibel Ochoa, director of the von Liebig Center; and Gabriel Estrella Valenzuela, president of UABC.



CleanTech San Diego and Long-Range Weather Prediction

Remember the San Diego Clean Tech Innovation and Commercialization Program that the von Liebig Center helped to run? Well, one of the projects selected (and funded at $50K) -- a novel scientific method for predicting extreme hot and cold weather events created at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at UC San Diego -- spun out of Scripps into EarthRisk Technologies. The latest issue of "Explorations" the e-magazine from SIO has a nice story about the project.

"Scripps climate scientist Alexander Gershunov, along with postdoctoral researcher Kristen Guirguis, developed the new approach, which uses past weather information to predict extreme temperature and precipitation events. The method offers forecasts for regions around the world with lead times up to 40 days. Existing techniques for predicting weather don't offer strong data beyond 15 days. "

The full story by Shannon Casey is here. More info on the Von Liebig Center is here.

Von Liebig Center Helps San Diego Universities Win DOE Clean Tech Grant

San Diego university and industry leaders will work to accelerate the transfer of energy efficiency and renewable energy innovations from university laboratories into the marketplace under a new three-year, $1.05 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).  The UC San Diego William J. von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement at the Jacobs School of Engineering and the Rady School of Management in partnership with the San Diego State University will hold a series of Regional Energy Innovation Challenges, providing fellowships and extensive mentoring support for students and faculty working on the most promising technologies.

Read the full story on the Jacobs School Web site.

Rosibel Ochoa, Executive Director, Von Liebig Center, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Von Liebig Center in New York Times

The Von Liebig Center here at the Jacobs School is highlighted in a great story in the New York Times with the headline "The Idea Incubator Goes to Campus" by Bob Tedeschi.

The story is about how universities are supporting the commercialization of the early-state inventions that stream out of universities every year.

From the New York Times story:

In the jargon of academia, the locations of such matchmaking are known as “proof-of-concept centers,” and they’re among a number of new approaches to commercializing university research in more efficient and purposeful ways — and to preventing good ideas from dying quietly. The first proof-of-concept center, the William J. von Liebig Center, was established in 2001 at the University of California, San Diego.

The story mentions by name Mushroom Networks and Biological Dynamics -- two of the 26 companies that the von Liebig Center has helped through seed funding, advisory services and entrepreneurship classes. Those startups have created more than 180 jobs and attracted more than $87 million in financing.

Mushroom Networks is a UC San Diego startup founded by electrical engineering professor Rene Cruz in 2004. Mushroom Networks provides innovative networking solutions. On their Web site Mushroom Networks writes, "Our products and services are focused on a range of networking solutions for Internet access for the broadband industry and networking solutions for the digital living room."

Biological Dynamics was founded in 2009 by then UC San Diego bioengineering Ph.D. student (now alumnus) Raj Krishnan. Biological Dynamics is developing early-stage cancer diagnostics that identify and separate secondary cancer biomarkers directly from blood, such as cell-free circulating high molecular weight DNA.

Watch a two minute video of Raj Krishnan talking about his startup and entrepreneurship at UC San Diego on the Jacobs School video portal. The video is embedded below. (Also, check out the Jacobs School of Engineering YouTube Channel.)

Update: This video is now linked from a comment on the New York Times story.

Structural Engineering Professor and von Liebig Center Featured in San Diego Business Journal

Jacobs School of Engineering structural engineering professor Yu Qiao (pictured above), his startup AgileNano and the UCSD William J. von Liebig Center are featured in a recent San Diego Business Journal story by Ned Randolph.

The subject: Agile Nano--the start-up company that crystalized around the nanotechnology based compressible energy absorbing liquid that Qiao and his team developed.

The material absorbs energy on a near molecular scale instead of relying on the mechanical properties of solid materials. One of the first applications the researchers are looking at: military helmets that better protect against brain trauma. Learn more about AgileNano's technology here.

“San Diego is a very unique community,” says Rosibel Ochoa, von Liebig Center executive director. “We all know each other, and everyone contributes. You can leverage a lot of resources for companies to get started and grow.”

Read the full story here: "Startups Connect With Investors on Their Way to Market"

Read a story in the Jacobs School alumni magazine Pulse about professor Yu Qiao's work in energy conservation and clean tech.