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Home > BizTimes Daily > Archives > June 10, 2008
Nanotech company wins Governor's Business Plan Contest
Published June 10, 2008 - BizTimes Daily
Graphene Solutions, a nanotechnology company that features a 17-year-old student on its scientific team, is the grand prize winner in the 2008 Wisconsin Governor's Business Plan Contest.
The company, led by University of Wisconsin-Platteville chemistry professor Jim Hamilton and chief executive officer Philip Jackson, has patent-pending technology that could transform electronics, optics and materials science.
Philip Streich, a student who takes classes at Platteville and online through Stanford University, is co-inventor of the firm's platform for dissolving carbon nanotubes, graphene nanosheets and other materials so they can be purified and spread in a layer one atom thick.
Fifty-four judges took part in a process that progressively narrowed a field of 250 entries to 51 semi-finalists, 23 finalists and four category winners in Advanced Manufacturing, Business Services, Information Technology and Life Sciences. Graphene Solutions was the winner in the Advanced Manufacturing category and will collect cash and in-kind prizes worth $50,000.
Electrons travel 100 times faster in graphene (one-atom-thick sheets of carbon that form in an incredibly strong lattice) than in silicon. Possible uses of graphene range from television screens that are no thicker than a poster, to computer chips, batteries, sensors, solar cells and medical devices.
"Graphene Solutions proves that game-changing technologies are being produced on UW System campuses as well as the UW-Madison. It also demonstrates the value to our economy of supporting researchers as they move these technologies from the lab to the marketplace," said Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, which presented the contest this week at the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs Conference in Milwaukee.
