2013 UNSW Innovation Awards

The 2013 UNSW Innovation Awards winners have been announced. The awards recognise and reward the effort and ingenuity of UNSW staff and students, along with potential partner organisations, in the creation and transfer of new knowledge and innovations into society and the economy.

This year’s UNSW Innovation Award 2013 was presented to Associate Professor Gregg Suaning, whose bionic eye for the blind also won him the Advanced Innovation - Partnerships award.

The bionic eye looks like a simple pair of sunglasses, but it actually features an implantable chip with 98 electrodes. These stimulate the retina and send signals from an external camera along the optic nerve into the brain, where they are interpreted as vision.

Associate Professor Suaning has been working on the device with his collaborator, Professor Nigel Lovell, for more than 10 years, and it could be ready for human trials as early as next year.

The student-led Innovation Award went to the team who developed ‘Ezy Amp’ - software to enable portable diagnostic devices to rapidly test DNA on-site, eg, for the detection of diseases and contaminants in water.

Ezy Amp lead developer Evelyn Linardy noted that the test “can be done by anyone anywhere, like the staff at border control or patients in a remote developing country”. She and her team also won the student prize for Early Stage Innovation.

The Best New Invention was awarded to electrical engineering student Saeed Afshar, who has developed a biologically inspired neural network algorithm that can perform real-time object recognition. The staff prize, meanwhile, went to Dr Sean O’Byrne for his additive printing process for molten metals.

The Early Stage Innovation prize was won by Associate Professor John Pimanda and Dr Vashe Chandrakanthan from UNSW Medicine. They have discovered a way to reprogram developed cells into stem cells for tissue repair.

The Advanced Innovation - Team award went to Avudai and Chitra Avudainayagam for their mass eye test. Based on the ability to perceive polarisation of light, the test for macular degeneration and squinting eye disorders can be used in shop windows, cinemas and optometry shops.

The People’s Choice Award was presented to Maria Kavallaris and Joshua McCarroll, who were finalists in the Advanced Innovations - Partnerships category for their development of a first-in-class lung cancer therapeutic.

The annual awards are coordinated by the university’s commercialisation company NewSouth Innovations (NSi).