Brief Project Overview:A partnership has been established between the University of Southern Mississippi, Jones Junior College, 6 multinational corporations, and a cluster of small start-up companies. The objectives of the partnership are to:

•Accelerate innovation by developing combinatorial techniques for polymer formulation

•Educate a globally competent scientific workforce that is skilled in combinatorial techniques

•Rapidly introduce new technologies by partnering with multinational companies

•Gain access to commercial scale equipment for commercialization of new techologies

Top Contributions/Outcomes :1.Interactive Projects involving students with top-level industrial scientists were established

Project teleconferences approximately every 2 weeks with all students and industrial partners

2. A new high-throughput lab has been established in the new National Formulation Science Laboratory

•Sophisticated robotics donated by our partner P&G

•Microchannel Emulsification device donated by our new partner Velocys (Dublin, Ohio)

3. All of our students have been placed as summer interns with our partner companies

•We are preparing to “teach the teachers in our lab this summer

4. One of our projects with a start-up– Scigenesis- proved the principle of heat reflecting camouflage facepaint and moved to Phase II SBIR with DoD

A Multinational Partnership to Incite Innovation via New Generation Tailored Polymers for Interfaces

The University of Southern MississippiThe School of Polymers & High Performance Materials

PI: Robert Y. Lochhead Co PIs: Cecil D. Burge, Joseph Graben, Sarah Morgan, Derek Patton

NSF Award 0917730 3 Year Award Start Date: 8/01/09

Top Challenges:1. The National Formulation Lab, scheduled to open in Sept 2009, did not open until March 2010. Projects were conducted in shared space at the University

2. Due to the economic downturn, our partnership with Chemspeed (for access to their sophisticated robots) was delayed and has not yet materialized other partners stepped up to donate essential robotic equipment

3.Due to acquisitions Dow and BASF were late starters

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Program Activities:

Active Partners:

Key Attributes of our Innovation Ecosystem:

Questioning & Curiosity:•Can modern materials be developed more rapidly and efficiently by combinatorial robotic techniques and data-mining?

•What are the rules for enhancing innovation via a partnership confining multinationals, entrepreneurs, university researchers and a small national lab?

•How to prepare the scientific workforce of the future for. World of robotic experiments, informatics and knowledge networking?

• How to translate all of this into economic benefit?

Risk Taking:Initiative risks:

• In this rapidly emerging field which robotic platforms to embrace?

•Ensure that proper space was available for the robotics laboratory.

Interdependence Risks

• To convince academic stakeholders of the need to include industrialists in the education of’ the scientific workforce

• To convince industrialists that their intellectual property will not be compromised by this partnership.

Integrative Risks

•Ensure that every partner contributes effort and receives benefits.•Openness:•It is essential to be candid.

•We admitted that we were “dead in the water“ when our robotic liquid handler crashed

•P&G responded by donating a complete robotic liquid handling platform to the effort - with no strings attached!

•GSK was delayed by the economy; BASF was delayed by a large acquisition.

•We waited for them and they are both on board and taking student interns this summer.

Collaboration Across Fields:This partnership is all about merging robotics, information, chemistry and materials science with innovation hypotheses.Placing Partners in “New Environments” & “Playgrounds”:All of our students will intern in industry each summer.

Community College instructors will intern’ in the high throughout laboratory.

Next year industrialists will time-share in the high-throughput laboratoryLeading/Inspiring of Surprising or Unexpected ResultsP&G and Velocys ‘saved’ us by equipment donation

A new class of genetically engineered polysaccharides showed no benefit. Years of futile laboratory exploration were averted.

National Science Foundation Partnerships For InnovationGrantee’s Meeting April 25-27, 2010 Arlington, VA. .PFI

Students were engaged in real projects with each of our partners. During the academic year, the students conducted research under the ‘tele-mentorship’ of industrial scientists. Each summer the students will continue their project as interns in the respective companies. The void left by the students leaving during summers will be filled by Local teachers, high school students and junior college students who will be exposed to basic education in materials formulation:

•Develop new delivery systems for topicals based on stimuli-responsive polymer/surfactant interaction

•With Procter & Gamble and Dow Chemical

• Develop new stimuli-responsive polymer stabilizers for hydrophobic dispersions

•With Glaxo Smith Kline

•Develop New stimuli responsive systems from self-assembling block copolymers

•With BASF

•Develop Camouflage Face Paint with an appropriate spectral reflection in Near-IR to prevent ballistic heat burns

•With Scigenesis (A start up company)•DoD SBIR Project

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SciGenesis

High Throughput formulation

Robotic Handling and measurement

HIGHPERFORMANCE COMPUTATION

‘Informatics’

HIGHPERFORMANCEVISUALIZATION

surfactant, polymer, water/salt

water/salt, polymer, surfactant

Scigenesis Proof of Principle

established and Phase II SBIR

awarded.

Our PFI students won 1st, 2nd and 3rd place student poster awards at Waterborne Conference New Orleans-Feb 2010 and co-authored a patent review