Plant Scientist Vince Pantalone Among Those Honored
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — For the second year, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is supporting entrepreneurial research led by UT faculty with Chancellor’s Innovation Fund awards of $50,000 for each project. This year’s winning researchers are testing an implantable prosthetic thumb, developing humanoid robots, protecting soybeans, improving data collection for manufacturing and creating aluminum-air batteries.
A team of faculty led by Vince Pantalone, the Charles E. Wharton UTIA Institute Professor and a member of the Department of Plant Sciences, will use the Chancellor’s Innovation Fund award to conduct DNA sequencing to make a superior variety of soybean. Soybeans are the top agricultural crop in Tennessee and the second leading crop in the nation, but a new race of soybean cyst nematode, SCN Race 2, can attack all existing breeds of soybeans. Pantalone and his colleague Tarek Hewezi, also a professor of Plant Sciences in the Herbert College of Agriculture, discovered a new gene for SCN Race 2 resistance last year. Field testing SCN Race 2-resistant crops this summer will allow the research team to gauge the performance of the lines and move the best selections forward to commercialization.
The Chancellor’s Innovation Fund was developed in 2023 to strengthen East Tennessee’s entrepreneurial network and support faculty who want to bring their technology to market.
The recipients, who were honored at an award ceremony on February 18, were chosen through a rigorous process that included a pitch competition during which they described the benefits of their technology and how the funding would help them commercialize the ideas.
Evaluations of the projects were based on their ability to address an unmet market need, the current state of technology, the proposed technology development plan and the funding’s impact on commercialization. UT Research Foundation supported the program by evaluating proposals and providing three dedicated coaching sessions – a crash course in delivering a compelling five-minute business pitch.
“I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work alongside such brilliant innovators and to witness their enthusiasm for learning something entirely new,” said Marc A. Nabhan, UT’s director of entrepreneurship and new ventures. “Their performance in the pitch competition was nothing short of inspiring, and I look forward to continuing to support and shape our world-class researchers into entrepreneurial visionaries.”
Dustin Crouch, Sai Swaminathan, Thomas Zawodzinski, Brian Washington, and a faculty team comprised of Jindong Tan, Shuai Li and Weizi Li, all from UT’s Tickle College of Engineering, are the other recipients.
See also: UTK News
