Driven by the desire to end the devastation caused by the pandemic, Prof. Matthew DeLisa, chemical engineering, turned E. coli bacterium into a powerful biotechnology tool to yield fast answers to COVID-19 questions.
The Cornell Alliance for Science seeks to promote access to scientific innovation as a means of enhancing food security, improving environmental sustainability, and raising the quality of life globally, according to its website.
In 2016, three Cornell students, Apoorva Kiran, Ph.D. ’17, Pankaj Singh, Ph.D. ’17 and Jason Guss, Ph.D. ’18 embarked on a technical journey to tackle prevalent injuries in workspaces. The group found that their Ph.D. programs in mechanical and biomedical engineering required abundant amounts of time on computers. The frequent hand movements that were thus necessary, soon resulted in the buildup of pain within their wrists. It was then that Kiran, after finding various biomedical technologies for back pain and slouching, came up with the idea of creating a similar technology that targeted wrists — with the hope being that the device would vibrate when the hand was placed in an injurious position. With this idea, Orthofit was born and the three co-founders worked towards creating a glove that would be able to provide the functionality of informing users when their wrists were in harmful positions.