April 26, 2007
Hattiesburg, MS - On April 26th, young entrepreneurs from South Mississippi gathered at the Cochran Center on the Southern Miss Campus to compete in the 3rd Annual Invent Your Future! Competition. The six finalists in this year’s competition were composed of a high school junior and Mississippi graduate students. Their inventions ranged from coatings for medical devices to drug targets for fighting staph infection.
Winning the competition were Andrew Magenau, Ted Novitsky and Robert Smith of Pierce-Safe Technologies. This team, comprised of graduate students from Southern Miss and Ole Miss, is developing a coating for earring and body piercing studs that will ward off infection after the piercing. “We have been working on this idea for several months and are excited to win first place. The five thousand dollar ($5,000) first place prize will enable us to evaluate the patenting options for this technology and begin prototype work,” said Mr. Novitsky.
Sam Tucker, Pirro Cipi, and Tammy Nolan took second place and $3,000 with a catheter and intubation tube coating. Once the coating is developed, the team plans to license the technology to a coating company or medical device manufacturer.
The Emergency Medical Tourniquet developed by Seminary High School Student, Adam Sanford “seeks to reduce the #1 cause of death on a battlefield – blood loss from an extremity.” Sanford got the idea to incorporate tourniquets that can be easily operated by the injured soldier into military uniforms from all the media coverage of the war in Iraq.
The competition is co-hosted by Noetic Technologies, Inc. and the College of Science and Technology at the University of Southern Mississippi.
The Invent Your Future! contest is open to Mississippi high school, junior college and university students and creates a mechanism for students to showcase their ideas, get feedback from a panel of experts and hopefully, continue the development of their technology.
The competition was sponsored by Crosslink, Welsh & Katz, Ltd., Mississippi Technology Alliance, Respirtek, and the Area Development Partnership.
From R to L: Leslie Goff, President & CEO Noetic Technologies; Ted Novitsky; Andy Magenau; Sam Tucker; Pirro Cipi; Adam Sanford; Kelli Booth, Noetic Marketing Director
Noetic Technologies, Inc., a company with a combined 45 years of expertise in moving projects from research to commercial reality, offers a variety of private partnerships including research, licensing, joint ventures and start-ups.
 |