The WashU Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship held its spring awards ceremony April 15.
WashU students and alumni were recognized for excellence in innovation, entrepreneurship and mentorship. The center also announced winners of the Global Impact Award and the Skandalaris Venture Competition. In total, WashU startups received nearly $125,000 in funding during the event.
The first Global Impact Award went to NeuroFore, developer of a patent-pending machine learning algorithm that analyzes non-motor symptoms to detect and diagnose Parkinson’s disease. Founder Hamasa Ebadi, a WashU PhD student, received $25,000.
The second Global Impact Award went to uFab, maker of etchant-free, laser-based circuit board-printing systems that compress a whole circuit-board factory line into a single machine. Founder Tyler Richards, a 2022 engineering alumnus, received $50,000.
Additionally, nine teams received a combined $42,000 in funding through the Skandalaris Venture Competition. These awards provide resources for promising startups at various stages to explore and refine their concepts further or to support the launch of startups poised for growth.
The center also announced that Eli Abdou, a WashU Medicine student, and Jeffrey Chen, a junior at WashU McKelvey Engineering, founders of NeuroMap, are the inaugural recipients of the Mayfield AI Garage Award. Through this partnership with Mayfield, one of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firms, the center will provide student-led teams with resources and mentorship to explore their early-stage artificial intelligence (AI) ideas, providing a pathway from concept to venture. NeuroMap is an AI-powered tool that helps neurosurgeons access millions of research findings in the context of a patient’s specific surgical target.
Learn more about the winners on the Skandalaris Center website.
