Doctoral student Yuehua “Tony” Yu was awarded the Lemelson-Rensselaer award last Wednesday for his research in creating binary guanosine gels, dubbed “G-gels,” which can be tuned and manipulated to suit a number of applications.
The Lemelson-Rensselaer award is funded through the Lemelson-MIT program, which, according to Acting Dean of the School of Engineering Tim Wei, is a “non-profit organization that recognizes outstanding inventors; encourages sustainable, new solutions to real world problems; and enables and inspires young people to pursue creative lives and careers through invention.” The criteria that go into deciding the winning student are inventive behavior, creativity, potential as a role model, societal benefit, and potential for commercial success.
President Shirley Ann Jackson remarked during the ceremony that it was “another great day for innovation as we continue to build critical mass for creative invention across our campus.”
Yu’s winning research was the creation of inexpensive, nontoxic, and bio-compatible G-gels, which are the first to be developed with more than one guanosine compound. This property allows the substance to act as a liquid at lower temperatures and a firm gel when heated to room or body temperature.
These G-gels “can be used to disperse nanomaterials without damaging or altering their attractive properties, as well as to extend the stability of different enzymes months beyond their traditional shelf lives,” according to Jackson. The discovery has potential applications in drug and gene delivery, implantable medical devices, and the suspension of live cells.
Yu is the third recipient of the $30,000 Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize. The prize, first given in 2007, is awarded annually to a Rensselaer senior or graduate student who has created or improved a product or process, applied a technology in a new way, redesigned a system, or demonstrated remarkable inventiveness.
The two other finalists in this year’s competition were graduate students Ranganath Teki and Mei-Ling Kuo. Teki’s research focused on green energy and efficiency, offering technical solutions for challenges facing the development of batteries and fuel cells.
On the other hand, Kuo’s discovery was a multilayer anti-reflection layer for solar cell applications, which boosts the amount of sunlight caught by solar cells and allows panels to absorb the entire solar spectrum from nearly any angle.
During the ceremony, Dorothy Lemelson stated that her husband’s dream in creating the Lemelson Foundation was to have “a way of celebrating the accomplishments of scientists so that students throughout the country would become energized and interested in becoming scientists and mathematicians.”
Lemelson continued, “He felt the country desperately needed this influx of enthusiastic people.”
