Hyun Gil Cha, left, and Kyoung-Shin Choi (Photos courtesy WARF)
Chemistry Professor Kyoung-Shin Choi and postdoctoral fellow Hyun Gil Cha have won an Innovation Award from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).
Choi and Cha were recognized for their work using solar energy to transform biomass into a highly prized industrial molecule. Their method employs a special type of solar cell to drive a mild but highly efficient chemical reaction.
More specifically, the process oxidizes the biomass chemical HMF (5-hydroxymethylfurfural) into a compound called FDCA (2,5-furandicarboxylic acid), which is used in industry to produce polymer materials, pharmaceuticals, antifungal agents, organic conductors and much more.
The new process is sustainable and may be used to develop plant-based plastics down the line.
"It's still early but there are people in industry already interested in our work," says Choi. "We're putting two different fields together — biomass conversion and solar energy."
A team from the Department of Biochemistry also received an Innovation Award in the campus-wide competition.
An independent panel of judges selected the winners from a field of six finalists. These finalists were drawn from among more than 380 invention disclosures submitted to WARF over the past 12 months. The winning inventions each receive an award of $5,000, with the funds going to the UW-Madison inventors named on the breakthroughs.
Other finalists from the College of Letters & Science included: Associate Professor of Computer Sciences Karthikeyan Sankaralingam and researchers Jaikrishnan Menon and Lorenzo De Carli for a high-performance memory processing unit, and Professor of Physics Robert McDermott and researcher Pradeep Kumar for advancements in quantum computing.
Story by Sally Younger, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation