Research on University of California’s 10 Campuses Gives Rise to Many New Enterprises
Published May 27, 2009
UCLA is one of the 10 UC campuses where research has given rise to scores of companies, including 55 in the last fiscal year.
Imagine a washing machine that notifies you when it’s time to wash clothes, based on the time of day when electricity rates are lowest. The idea is to reduce electricity consumption at times of peak demand, thus improving power-production efficiency and ultimately curbing the number of plants needed to handle the load.
Researchers at startup company SynapSense Corp. in Folsom aren’t imagining the device that will make this happen. They’re designing it.
Launched in 2006, SynapSense specializes in wireless instrumentation to collect and transmit data. Packaged as devices the size of a matchbox, the SynapSense technology already is in use by Yahoo! and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to improve the energy efficiency of their data centers.
SynapSense is just one example of a private-sector enterprise born from research at one of the University of California’s 10 campuses. In fact, more than 400 startup companies have been founded based on UC-developed technologies, 55 of them during the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2008, according to Patricia Cotton, director of business development and intellectual property management for the UC system. Licensing income for the system from agreements with industry totaled an impressive $128.4 million for fiscal 2008.
Green Energy and Genentech
“One of the goals of our tech-transfer program is to create public benefit from UC research,” Cotton says, adding that more than 30 startup companies are in renewable or sustainable energy. From UC Riverside, there’s Viresco Energy LLC, converting feedstocks to a fuel gas. From UCLA, there’s Solarmer Energy Inc., producing transparent, flexible plastic solar cells. From UC Berkeley, there’s Aurora BioFuels Inc., using microalgae to generate bio-oil. And from UC Davis, there’s SynapSense.
“We consider ourselves almost like an extension of UC Davis,” says Raju Pandey, SynapSense co-founder and an assistant professor on leave from the UC Davis Department of Computer Science. Pandey’s university research forms the technological core of SynapSense’s product-development initiatives. “SynapSense is more about how to take this technology and make it more robust and more scalable and then how to apply it,” Pandey says. The data-center application is the first of many, he adds.
SynapSense employs 27 people who work mostly on system design – both hardware and software – and implementation.
Businesses spawned by UC research cover an array of sectors, from telecommunications and automation to medical devices and biotechnology. One premier example is Genentech Inc., founded in 1976 after UC San Francisco biochemist Herbert Boyer and geneticist Stanley Cohen pioneered the scientific field of recombinant DNA technology. Considered the first biotech company, Genentech uses human genetic information to make new medicines.
Story by Sharon H. Fitzgerald
Photo by Courtesy of Stephanie Diani
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