Four Engineering Teams in Business Plan Top 12

May 12, 2016 - Four entrepreneurial-minded Samueli School of Engineering teams were among the top winners last week at UC Irvine’s 2016 Business Plan Competition, hosted by The Paul Merage School of Business and UCI Applied Innovation.The competition started with more than 80 applicants. The top 40 teams presented their company pitches to judges from the business community during the event, held at The Cove on the UCI campus May 6. The 12 winning teams shared $100,000 in cash and prizes.

The engineering teams in the top 12 were:

EmbryLux, which won first place in two categories and $20,000: $10,000 in the life sciences/clean tech track and $10,000 for the UCI intellectual property track. The team is developing a device that quantitatively screens embryos before in vitro fertilization (IVF) implantation to predict their chances of successful birth. Team members are students Tiffany Chien, Yingkai (Kyle) Su, Thai Nguyen, Shin Fukazawa and Daniel Tran.

Sher Biomedical, which won $10,000 and the School of Medicine Award. Team members include graduate students Rachel Gurlin and Avid Najdahmadi, postdoc Bhupinder Shergill, Department of Surgery professor Jonathan Lakey and Department of Biomedical Engineering professor Elliot Botnivick. The team’s concept is to create an implantable and refillable system for the treatment of insulin-dependent diabetes.

CeleriBio, which is developing a novel diagnostic device to identify extremely low concentrations of pathogens at early stages for diagnosing infection with greater accuracy and speed. The team, consisting of students Sean Freeman, Nikki Koe, Louai Labanieh, Binh Le and Sadaf Mirnia, won second place and $5,000 in the life sciences/clean tech track.

Curaflow, which seeks to construct a smaller, quieter CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) mask that will eliminate problems associated with obstructive sleep apnea in a more effective and desirable manner. Team members Jeffrey Chum, Josh Drum, Michael Shenk, Matthew Vasquez and Sam Pasin won second place and $5,000 in the consumer products track.

The annual Business Plan Competition, started by the Beall Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Merage School, was sponsored this year by the Beall Family Foundation, UCI’s Blum Center for Poverty Alleviation, Microsemi, the Stradling law firm, the Fish & Tsang law firm, the Nguyen & Tarbet law firm, Iris Technology, Calit2 and the UCI School of Medicine.