Three Sandia National Laboratories research teams and one
Sandia executive will be presented national awards by the Federal
Laboratory Consortium (FLC) for their skills in transferring technology
from Sandia to the private sector.
Team trophies and individual leather-bound certificates will
be provided to 2007 winners on May 8 in Portland, Ore.
The four awards (one was joint) were the most won by any
national laboratory.
The Cherry Hills, N.J.-based FLC maintains a nationwide
network that helps link federal laboratory technologies with the
marketplace. Sandia’s “ElectroNeedle Biomedical
Sensor Array” and the “Secure Sensor and Seal
Technologies for Global Nuclear Non-proliferation” won
Excellence in Technology Transfer awards.
The electroneedle sensor, when pressed against the skin,
provides rapid, on-demand, point-of-care biomedical assays for medical
diagnosis.
Two new biotechnology companies — New Mexico Biotech
Inc. and Life BioScience Inc. — have been formed in
Albuquerque explicitly for ElectroNeedle commercialization.
The Secure Sensor forms a seal that alerts security personnel
via radio frequency if it is broken. These seals are intended
for long-term use without maintenance for up to five years on one
battery.
Canberra Albuquerque commercialized one aspect of the project
and is collaborating on the development of a second.
Also winning an Excellence in Technology Transfer award, in a
joint submission with the Naval Research Laboratory, was the
“Helical Fiber Amplifier.” This method coils fibers
to make high-power fiber lasers possible. The solution resolved power
limitations of fiber lasers that had stymied the industry since fiber
lasers were first developed in 1963, while preserving high beam-quality
output.
Transfer of the helical fiber amplifier (also called
mode-filtered fiber amplifier) was achieved to commercial laser
manufacturers Nufern of East Granby, Conn.; Liekki Corporation of
Lohja, Finland; and IMRA America Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich. By 2006, all
three companies had received patent licenses allowing use of the
innovative technology in their laser-based product lines, and two
subsequent licenses have since been issued.
David Goldheim, director of Sandia’s Strategic
Relationships Center from 1999 to 2007, received the Outstanding
Technology Transfer Professional award for numerous innovations in
easing the transfer of technology.
Goldheim was praised for his “leadership,
inventiveness, and tenacity in developing and shepherding innovative
programs that support Sandia’s business development and
strategic intellectual property (IP) management efforts.”
A panel of experts from industry, state and local government,
academia, and the federal laboratory system judges nominations.
The FLC, organized in 1974, according to its own description
“develops and tests transfer methods, addresses barriers to
the process, provides training, highlights grass-roots transfer
efforts, and emphasizes national initiatives where technology transfer
has a role.”
“They also publicize the value of technology
commercialization in national and regional forums,” says
Goldheim