STAR awards will be funded each year on a competitive basis for up to $100,000 per project. Projects must fall within NSF-supported areas, and demonstrate a clear path to translational impact, with the objective to achieve prototype or validation of commercial use by the end of the grant period.
Applicants must be employees and/or students at the University of Wyoming and able to demonstrate industry engagement or interest in the project proposed.
For more information, please download the STAR application packet.
Co-PIs: Drs. John Oakey and Cynthia Weinig
Controlled environment agriculture (CEA), indoor hydroponic farming, is rapidly emerging as a way to optimize agricultural production, including increases in both crop yield and crop nutritional quality. Engineering innovations have been applied to all aspects of CEA, from seed germination to plant growth and harvesting. One area that the industry has largely failed to optimize is plant growth substrates (PGS), which are largely still composed of sterile mats of fibrous minerals called “rockwool.” The key objective of this project is to develop a fundamentally unique PGS that is vastly superior to rockwool. This will be accomplished by encapsulating beneficial bacteria within specialized soil surrogates to recreate a natural root zone, complete with an intact microbiome. Referred to as MicroBiome-Utilizing Growth Substrates (μBUGS), these materials will host the microbiome within a material that is salubrious to its growth and propagation, while allowing reciprocal diffusional transfer of exudates from growing plant roots to microbes and of microbial metabolites to the plant roots. Based upon customer discovery conversations with Plenty, Inc., this innovation overcomes a key bottleneck that has hindered the introduction of beneficial bacteria communities into CEA and would be readily adopted when available as a commercial product.
PI: Dr. Debashis Dutta
Influenza (flu) infections are commonly diagnosed using Rapid Influenza Diagnostic Tests or RIDTs that are inexpensive, do not require specialized equipment, and can provide results within 15 minutes. RIDTs, however, often produce false negative results requiring that their outcomes be validated with advanced tests which largely compromises their time and cost benefits. In this project, we propose to improve RIDT sensitivity by developing a Lateral Flow Immunoassay (LFIA) device capable of analyzing nasal swab samples collected on a dissolvable surface. The use of a dissolvable surface will cut down the liquid volume requirement into which the swab sample is transferred from 350-500 μL to 20-50 μL allowing analysis of the entire specimen rather than a small fraction of it. The proposed LFIA device will be capable of working with this lower liquid volume and experience minimal interference from the solubilized surface material. Additionally, the intensity of the test line in it will be improved using a specialized membrane. A 100-fold improvement in test sensitivity will be targeted combining the above strategies in Phase I of the project. In Phase II, the performance of our LFIA platform will be validated using human nasal swab samples collected by our clinician collaborators. Our higher RIDT sensitivity will eliminate the need for validating its outcomes using PCR methods, saving $100-200 in testing cost per incidence and allowing improved disease treatment/management through access to reliable test results within 15 minutes.
PI: Dr. Po Chen
F3DT is a new technology for non-invasive imaging of the interior of an object. It is like the CT scan for imaging the interior of the human body, but instead of using radiative X-rays, it uses non-invasive mechanical waves (i.e., elastic waves in solids, sound waves in liquids). F3DT has a wide range of applications, including geophysical exploration for natural resources, seismic hazard assessment for earthquake insurance pricing, foundation engineering and tunnel construction in civil engineering, non-destructive testing (NDT) for evaluating potential defects in materials, components and structures in mechanical engineering, medical diagnosis of breast cancer and other conditions involving soft tissues, and sonar imaging for underwater object detection and characterization. In the past, various techniques have been explored to improve the resolution of mechanical-wave-based tomography. The F3DT technique developed by the PI at University of Wyoming takes a data-intensive approach that seeks full utilization of all waveform data provided by modern wave-recording sensors (i.e., full-waveform inversion). If this proposal is funded, F3DT will become the first multi-disciplinary commercial 3D full-waveform inversion software in the tomography software market. The computational cost for F3DT is substantially higher than its alternatives. Unlike alternative techniques that can be carried out on a desktop computer, F3DT usually needs a computer cluster. With the advent of cloud computing and the continuing decline of cloud computing costs, we can foresee the wide adoption of F3DT implemented on virtual computer clusters built on the cloud infrastructure.
Co-PIs: Drs. Jeffrey Nivitanont and Shane Murphy
The Downwind Transect Quantification – Peak Covariance Method (PCM) is a mobile emissions quantification technique that has been shown to quantify methane emissions from Oil and Natural Gas (O&G) production facilities to within 5% of the research gold-standard tracer flux method. PCM was conceptualized by our team using methane survey data from operational O&G facilities with instruments integrated on the University of Wyoming Atmospheric Science Mobile Laboratory. Phase I activities will take our method from Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 6 to TRL 8 by taking those integrated instruments from the Mobile Laboratory and creating a fully integrated, portable “push-button” system (TRL 7). With the fully integrated system, we will characterize PCM under controlled release experiments at Colorado State University’s Methane Emissions Technology Evaluation Center (METEC) to qualify our method as an alternative methane detection technology under new EPA rules (TRL 8).
The main goal of Phase II will be to show that our method works with a wide range of existing sensor solutions marketed for methane leak detection and give potential licensees confidence in licensing our technique with their technology. Our team will experiment to identify low- and mid-range cost sensors that are adequate for PCM to identify potential cost-savings in equipment. Those sensors paired with PCM will then be fully characterized at METEC as was done in Phase I. Upon successful completion of Phase I and II goals, we will have demonstrated the first mobile methane emissions quantification technique that is quick, ready for commercialization, and cost-efficient (TRL 9).
PI: Dr. Mark Gomelsky
By the age of eight, most American children have dental cavities, characterized by CDC as one of the greatest unmet health treatment needs. Dental cavities result from caries, a disease caused by the teeth biofilms (plaques) formed by bacteria Streptococcus mutans. While therapeutic mouthwashes (oral rinses) reduce caries, children younger than six cannot use them because of the danger of poisoning by the antimicrobial chemicals if the mouthwash is accidentally swallowed. A recently formed startup, MayPall, Inc., is developing a caries-preventing mouthwash that is safe to swallow. The mouthwash contains antibiofilm compounds from maple sap that inhibit surface attachment in Streptococcus (patent pending). Because maple sap is drinkable, a sap-based mouthwash will be safe to swallow. The project goal is to generate the proof of concept that maple compounds inhibit attachment to tooth-like hydroxyapatite material in various S. mutans strains, and to identify the mechanism of attachment inhibition. Project results will strengthen our application to the NIDCR STTR program to fund animal, and subsequently human, studies. MayPall intends to overturn the status quo where tens of millions of children lack access to a therapeutically efficacious mouthwash that is safe-to-swallow. Parents of young children represent an untapped market niche for our antibiofilm mouthwash. MayPall intends to gain a significant share of the US mouthwash market valued at $6 billion and growing at a 4.6% annual rate. In the future, MayPall will expand the use of maple antibiofilm compounds into the oral health, wound care and food safety markets.
