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I'm Govind Rao, Director for the Center
for Advanced Sensor Technology
and I've been at your UMBC for twenty five years.
We started the center as an umbrella group
to capture innovation
that would lead to new low-cost sensor based products now we have
transformative effect.
The focus here is
transforming life through technology
but having the high impact
for major problems in society
and I don't do this alone, it's really a team effort we have people who are
committed to this cause of transformative technology that will impact broadest
number of people and everyone really has
a passion for it and that's what makes us different.
Interdisciplinary approach is ingrained in our work
and we live and breathe it
nobody can be the expert in everything.
We get here people from chemistry,
we get people from chemical engineering, we get people from biology, we get
people from electrical engineering, computer science.
Our focus is disruptive innovation
by that I mean coming up with devices, technologies that are game changers.
One of the foremost projects that we're working on
is something that could revolutionize
how blood glucose is monitored for diabetes a non-invasive glucose sensor.
The traditional glucose sensor
you prick the finger, you get a blood sample and then you analyze it
with your device.
uh... we are trying to go away from that all together
by simply measuring the glucose that
diffuses through the skin. With the non-invasive glucose sensor there's no
pain, its not messy, its easy.
And so these are the kinds of things
where we can have an enormous impact on people's lives, that's one project.
Another has to do with making how
drugs are made much cheaper.
Current sensor technology is very cumbersome we've come up with a
non-invasive sensor that allows you
to put a sensor into any transparent vessel and monitor noninvasively
because you can now peel and stick
this little sensor patch into any transparent vessel and presto you've
just created a
low-cost bioreactor.
Passion is something you can't fake, it really comes through and I think is why
we're very successful in attracting corporate partners and funding agencies
who come in and visit and see what we're doing and are immediately
sold on the compelling vision that we have.
So we uh... we got together uh...
a few times ending up with co-writing a grant proposal for the National
Institutes of Health
which got funded and I generated this really great energy that uh... GE has
been now taking advantage of as far as now putting its own funding into
UMBC
to uh... to
develop some really unique sensors for
infant care. It was a great partnership
it's uh... it's really relationship based partnership but UMBC brings
an amazing amount of technology where GE Health Care can use and eventually
productize and commercialize and um... really the idea is to reduce infant
mortality rates globally uh with this kind of technology that UMBC is unique
with.
uh... I developed a course called a survey of sensors and instrumentation
and
it is a highly technical subject but that's not all the students learn
they actually learn the basics of sensor technology
and one of the course requirements is to come up with an idea based on the
sensor technology and work in teams
and write a business plan around it.
It's no longer sufficient and this is something I tell my students unlike
their parents they are guaranteed
to change fields
several times over the course of their careers and to do that they need to be
nimble, they need to be willing to learn
from a variety of different fields
and they need to always reinvent themselves. There's a tremendous
advantage to be gained
if you can develop someone's curiosity because curiosity ultimately as human
beings that's the one trait that distinguishes us from all of the species
and if we can feed on that foster that nurture that developed that
that curiosity automatically leads
the discovery and discovery leads to innovation
innovation.