Engineering Students Achieve a Strong Showing at Merage Business Plan Competition

The Henry Samueli School of Engineering was well represented in the 2013 Business Plan Competition at UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business, with teams from Edwards Lifesciences Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Technology dominating the campus wide division.

The Merage Business Plan Competition offers UCI students, staff and researchers the opportunity to form a team, create a business plan and potentially fund their business idea, all within seven months. Nineteen teams competed in the final leg of this year’s competition. Seven teams won awards and six of the teams included one or more Samueli School students (highlighted in bold).  

 

Campus Wide Division

These awards are given to the team whose business plan and investment presentation best demonstrate evidence of an exciting market need, evidence of a viable business solution to meet that need and evidence of the ability to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

 

1st Place - $15,000

LAS - Laser Associated Sciences (LAS) is a medical device company that utilizes laser technology in the development of medical diagnostic instrumentation. LAS is the culmination of years of research and development experience within the core disciplines of physics, optics, and biomedical engineering.

Coach: Dale Sadlik

Charlene Ong

Tyler Rice

Sean White (BME/Edwards Lifesciences)

Bruce Yang (BME)

2nd Place - $7,500 (plus the $6,000 Techportal Orange Residency award and the $500 Best Concept Paper award- campuswide)

ValveStrong - ValveStrong will commercialize hybrid heart valve prostheses with self-regenerative capacity, lifelong durability, and enhanced biocompatibility.

Coach: Richard Henson

S. Hamed Alavi (BME/Edwards Lifesciences)

Peggy Bui

Seema Ehsan (CHEMS/Edwards Lifesciences)

 

3rd Place - $3,500 (plus the $30,000 UCI School of Medicine Life Sciences Award)

NoreGen - NoreGen is a medical diagnostic company that is developing a device to detect circulating tumor cells in blood, which will help doctors better monitor their patients’ cancer and guide their treatment. The device is based on a particle sensing technology originally developed by physicists and molecular biologists at UCI.

Coach: Alvin Viray

Neychelle Fernandes

Ashley Fong (Edwards Lifesciences)

Laura Innes

Robert Joachim

Jonathan Lin

Matthew Schiel (BME)

Zuzzana Siwy

 

Undergraduate Division - $2,500 (plus $500 Best Concept Paper award- undergrad)

Nobles Medical Technology - Cardiologists need practice for catheter surgeries on the heart. Nobles Medical Technologies 2 proposes an artificial pumping heart system for surgeons to practice catheter surgeries.

Coach: Demetri Andrikos

Shoumyo Dewan

Joseph Gomez (BME)

Jin Kim

Kenny La

Stephen Lee

Timothy Macagba (BME)

Suraj Sampath

Sohan Weeraratne (BME)

 

TechPortal Calit2 Residency Award - $2,750 in kind

TechPortal is a business technology incubator in the Calit2 Building. This award is given to the team that judges feel would most benefit from residency in the TechPortal Calit2 incubator.

 

MEGAL!NE - MEGAL!NE is a technology-based language learning software that can imitate pronunciations and create text streams while watching your favorite videos online using your smartphone or computer.

Coach: Tom Taulli

Kimberly Co

Jinelle D’souza

Matty Ochmanek

Sreevatsa Sreeraman (software engineering)

Xinlu Tong (software engineering)

Debbie Le Yu

 

UC Irvine Environment Institute Award - $2,500

This award is given to the team whose business plan and investment presentation best demonstrate evidence of an exciting market need in the Clean Tech market, evidence of a viable business solution to meet that need and evidence of the ability to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Bloom Diagnostics - Bloom Diagnostics™ has created an easy-to-use kit that provides real time identification of any of twenty foam-causing species of bacteria in a cheap and accurate way, well before blooming occurs, using state-of-art molecular diagnostic techniques currently widely used in healthcare.

Coach: Earle Hager

Amanda Gage

Kevin Leong

Ali Mansouri (CHEMS)

Syed Naqvi

Betty Olson

Johnway Yih