Synbio researchers nominated for UCPH Innovation Award

For the fifth time the UCPH Innovation Award is given to outstanding research converted for the benefit of society and industry.

The Diterpenoid group consists of Birger Lindberg Møller, Irini Pateraki, Johan Andersen-Ranberg, Dan Luo, Morten Thrane Nielsen and Björn Hamberger from Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences.

They have been nominated for:

• Outstanding achievements in developing technology and securing inventions, effective industrial collaborations as well as top-level communication and outreach.
• Filing no less than eight provisional patent applications within the last two years. License agreements are currently being negotiated for all applications. According to the KU tech-trans offer, this level of activity and industrial interest demonstrated is unprecedented at KU.
• Establishing an effective working relation to several companies and built a highly successful collaboration with the Swiss-Danish biotech company EVOLVA.
• Undertaking lecturing at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in the course Entrepreneurship and supervising several bachelor groups (3-6 students/group) focusing on business plans and commercialization of synthetic biology
• Successfully mentoring the student driven spin-out TychoBio that won VentureCup 2014 overall top prize (200.000 DKK plus free mentorship)
• Being nominated to and winning the PhD Cup Competition 2015 (Johan Andersen-Ranberg presenting the groups work)

Last year's Innovation Award was won by Matthew Johnson, who has led the research and development of a new method for purification of air, which is the basis of a newly formed cleantech spin-off company.

The Assessment Board of the Innovation Award has received 15 nominations in total for prize, the nominees are:
• Anders Miki Bojesen 
Professor, Veterinary Disease Biology, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences.
• Thomas Bjarnsholt
Professor, Dept. of Int. Health, Immunology and Microbiology, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences.
• Thue W. Schwartz
Professor, Dept. of Neurosciences and Pharmacology, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Faculty of Science.
• Postdoc Carl Meusinger med Professor Matthew S. Johnson
Dept. of Chemistry, Center for Atmospheric Research, Faculty of Science.
• Professor Jonas Jermiin Ravn Moll & Assistant Professor Tariq Osman Andersen
Dept. of Computer Science, Faculty of Science.
• Esben Bistrup Halvorsen
Postdoc, Dept. of Algorithms and Programming Language, Faculty of Science.
• Renate Müller 
Professor,  Dept. of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science.
• Diterpenoid Group
Birger Lindberg Møller, Irina Pateraki, Johan Andersen-Ranberg, Dan Luo, Morten Thrane Nielsen, Björn Hamberger, Dept. of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science.
• Ingolf Thuesen
Head of Department, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, Faculty of Humanities.
• Kristian Moltke Martiny
PhD Fellow, Dept. of Media, Cognition and Communication, Faculty of Humanities.
• Ayo Wahlberg 
Associate Professor/Postdoc, Dept. of Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences.
• Associate Professor Karen Lund Petersen & Center for Advanced Security 
Dept. of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences.
• Claus Thustrup Kreiner
Professor, Dept. of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences.
• David Dreyer Lassen
Professor, Dept. of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences.
• Jesper Lau Hansen (On behalf of working group on Entrepreneurship and Law)
Professor, Copenhagen Centre for Commercial Law, Faculty of Social Sciences.