CONVERGE
News and Notes from around The Park
April 7, 2021 | Issue 4
Construction complete on the Auburn Medical Pavilion

The Park at Auburn is pleased to welcome East Alabama Health (formerly East Alabama Medical Center) to the community. Construction was completed on their new facility, the Auburn Medical Pavilion, in March. Located on the western edge of The Park at 900 Camp Auburn Road and accessible through a new park entrance off Shug Jordan Parkway, The Auburn Medical Pavilion will include a free standing emergency department, an ambulatory surgery center, pharmacy, as well as health science and medical research units. They are currently in the process of equipping the facility and look forward to welcoming patients later this year.
Vulcan Line Tools wins seventh annual Tiger Cage Pitch Competition

Zac Young (above) won more than $25,000 in startup capital in March in the Seventh Annual Tiger Cage Student Business Pitch Competition.

“I showed up and didn’t even know what a pitch was – that’s how much they helped me,” said Young, a senior in mechanical engineering and founder of Vulcan Line Tools. “I’m an engineer at heart. I can bootstrap, design, build and solve problems. But presenting my ideas to potential investors was not my strong suit. Listening to an engineer talk about the importance of sag, tension and temperature in power lines isn’t exactly riveting.”

But the engineer who had never been in a pitch competition before was a quick study.

Commercializing Tech at Auburn: A Guide from IAC

For university researchers who have or may have developed a patentable invention or copyrightable material, the Office of Innovation Advancement and Commercialization, or IAC, is here to assist in moving that innovation to market. To help innovators better understand the commercialization process, IAC has released a video that outlines the basic steps from conception to licensing.

Contact Brian Wright, director for commercialization, if you have any questions or if you have an innovation you'd like to submit.
Creating Space for the Next Big Idea: Auburn Industrial Design Students and Playcore Energizing the Work Environment

Innovative thinking and creative problem-solving can be fueled both by collaboration and by quality time in outdoor spaces. Auburn’s industrial design students have teamed with Auburn Research Park and with PlayCore, a globally recognized leader in creating recreational spaces, to help transform The Park’s outdoor areas into energetic, collaborative zones for working and for recharging.

The longstanding partnership between Auburn’s Professor Tin-Man Lau and PlayCore’s Senior Vice President for Innovation, Tom Norquist, has created incredible opportunities for Auburn students and has yielded some amazing designs—designs that can now be found all over the world. (And, happily, right in our own back yard.)

In the Fall of 2019, Lau’s students were challenged to find a way to foster innovative, creative connections between and among the talented experts and researchers working in Auburn Research Park. Mentored both by Lau and Norquist, these students delivered on an incredible scale.

Members of The Park community had the opportunity to review the resulting designs and to share their feedback and preferences with the students, with Lau and Norquist, and with Park staff. Over the following months, a selection of designs was put into production and, in March of 2021, they were installed in The Park.

Funded by the State of Alabama, Tiger Giving Day donors and Playcore, fixtures include an outdoor collaboration space with whiteboard, tables and chairs, and benches along Devall Drive. Accessible, durable, weather-resistant and stylish, these spaces are natural convergence areas where community members can connect for work and relaxation.

Projects like this one demonstrate the power of connecting Auburn’s talented students with creative, resourceful partners. With gratitude, The Park acknowledges Auburn University’s industrial design students, faculty in the School of Industrial and Graphic Design, and the leadership at PlayCore who, collectively, have made this installation possible.
Introducing the GALT Prospector, a new tool for mining microbiomes

Here at Auburn and around the world, microbiologists are tapping into microbial populations in places like soil and the human gut in order to identify and develop microbiome-based diagnostics and therapeutics.

In early 2021, Auburn partnered with General Automation Lab Technologies (GALT) to bring a new and valuable tool for unlocking the promise of these microbiomes to Auburn University. That tool is the GALT Prospector.

Located in The Park’s Center for Advanced Science Innovation and Commerce (CASIC), the Prospector is a welcome addition to an ensemble of equipment available to faculty from multiple disciplines. A bench-top system, the Prospector can perform massively parallel microbial cultivation of bacteria from complex microbiome samples. The system uses a highly-dense array of nanoscale cultivation chambers that can grow thousands of microcolonies in parallel. The system automates the isolation and cultivation workflow through software-driven imaging, picking, and transfer of single isolates into standard multi-well plates for downstream analysis.

As part of this collaboration, GALT will support four research projects that will use the Prospector’s high-throughput microbial isolation and cultivation system to generate banks of live microbial isolates. The projects will be led by Mark Liles, a professor in biological sciences; Laura Huber, an assistant professor in pathobiology; Neha Potnis, an assistant professor in entomology and plant pathology; Leonardo De La Fuente, a professor in entomology and plant pathology and Deepak Shantharaj, a postdoctoral fellow also in entomology and plant pathology.

“We are enthusiastic about using the Prospector to culture thousands of bacteria,” said Professor Liles, “which will add to the extensive culture collections at Auburn University. We will be using these spore-forming bacteria as probiotics that can accelerate plant growth and/or inhibit disease in plants.”

With the assistance of the Prospector, studies that once took years can be completed in months or even weeks. Pairing this unique resource with Auburn expertise has the potential to yield a vast range of microbe-based advancements in agriculture, human health, water purity, food safety, and beyond.
A Conversation with Mark Liles

Mark Liles is the Marguerite Scharnagel Endowed Professor in biological sciences at Auburn, Co-founder and President of Varigen Biosciences Corporation, and a central member of The Park community. Earlier this year, Professor Liles chatted with CONVERGE about his research activity--particularly the applied research that has been successfully commercialized. Our conversation was the story behind the story, touching on lessons-learned and the need to connect not only with colleagues in other disciplines, but with stakeholders as well.

2021 LAUNCH Award Winners

In an effort to advance research ideas that benefit society and the economy, Auburn University recently awarded two faculty research projects $100,000 in LAUNCH funding support.

Established in 2015 by the Auburn University Research and Economic Development Advisory Board, the LAUNCH Fund for Research and Innovation involves multi-stage competition and related programming designed to bridge the gap between innovative research and the marketplace. The fund was created with the support of the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development as part of a commitment to advance entrepreneurship among Auburn’s research faculty.

On March 24, five faculty teams competed for a share of $100,000 in total funding. Due to constraints resulting from COVID-19, the event took place in a hybrid in-person and Zoom format, blending in-person pitches to judges, with the audience present for both the pitches and the award ceremony via Zoom. Two teams were selected to receive cash stipends from a pool of approximately $100,000 toward the commercialization of their work.

One of the award-winning teams this year included Dr. Kathy Lawrence and John McInroy of Entomology and Plant Pathology. Their project, “Probiotic Strain Collection for Reducing Drought Stress and Increasing Salt-Tolerance in Crops and Turf Grasses,” builds upon the successful commercialization of other libraries of bacterial strains assembled by Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Joseph Kloepper, Professor Emeritus of Plant Pathology. Globally, drought is increasingly devastating as world population grows and available cropland declines. Lawrence and McInroy were awarded $30,000 to expand Auburn’s probiotic libraries, to isolate and study bacteria present in extreme conditions, and to identify microbes that will aid plant growth. Their efforts will identify bacterial strains that could assist in expanding available farmland to include soils currently too salty for farming and/or help increase the tolerance of crops and grasses to droughts that may come as a result of changing climate. The strains identified in this project could impact plant production in ways that will help feed millions around the world.

This year’s other awarding-winning group is an interdisciplinary team including Dr. Lindsay Starkey and Dr. Byron Blagburn from the College of Veterinary Medicine’s Department of Pathobiology; Dr. Sarah Zhody, a vector-borne disease expert from the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences who recently transitioned from Auburn to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, and Dr. Melissa Boersma, an analytical chemist and Director of Auburn’s Mass Spectrometry Lab. LAUNCH funding of $70,000 will enable this team to establish the reliability of a breath test they developed for the non-invasive diagnosis of heart-worm disease in dogs. This test uses a specific chemical fingerprint found in a dog’s breath to determine whether or not the dog is infected with heart-worms. Initial results are encouraging and LAUNCH funding will allow the team to fully establish the reliability of the test in dogs of different breeds, diets, and backgrounds. The final version of the technology may be similar to a breathalyzer for dogs, avoiding the need for drawing blood and possibly detecting the presence of heart-worm earlier than current blood-based tests. This noninvasive approach to testing dogs could change the one billion dollar heart-worm testing market by expanding testing as well as improving both safety and convenience for pets and veterinarians.

As with any Auburn innovators whose projects are significantly advanced and demonstrated, LAUNCH award recipients will be connected to experts in Auburn's New Venture Accelerator, and to the professional staff of the Office of Innovation Advancement & Commercialization for help in devising pathways to commercialization.

“The LAUNCH program is designed to be a catalyst to push forward promising technologies to the commercialization stage and provide critical solutions to global problems. The awardees this year are great examples of that in action,” said Cary Chandler, director of the LAUNCH program and senior director of the Auburn Research and Technology Foundation. “It is essential to our land grant mission that we make investments in research and take it to market to provide real-world solutions and create jobs. Our goal is to find a way to increase the funding and frequency for this program to increase its success.”

More information about how Auburn supports experts through LAUNCH is available on the LAUNCH website.
Above: Award-Winner Lindsey Starkey with Vice President for Research and Economic Development Jim Weyhenmeyer

Below: Award-Winners Kathy Lawrence and John McInroy also with Jim Weyhenmeyer
LAUNCH slide image
Staff Spotlight
Phil Dunlap

Phil Dunlap is Auburn Research Park's Director. On any given day, Phil can be meeting with architects, contractors, landscapers, potential tenants, or startups.

From handling The Park's response to COVID-19 to the latest leak in one of our buildings, Phil covers some serious ground and is every tenant's go-to for assistance and support.

In spite of having a full plate of daily projects demanding his attention, Phil has his eye on the future and it's an exciting one.
Profiling the Park Community:
John Bright of Bright Investments

Bright Investments are financial advisors who focus on enabling clients and employee-owners to achieve their goals and make a difference in their communities. Bright Investments was founded in 2015 and is led by John Bright. Bright has over 20 years of experience in financial management that spans from Wall Street to Auburn as both an analyst and portfolio manager. He received his MBA at Auburn and was recently interviewed by Harbert College of Business where he described the decisions that shaped his life and career.

CONVERGE: News and Notes
from around The Park is a newly created publication from Auburn Research Park. CONVERGE aims to connect with members of The Park community and in turn, help them connect with one other and with university expertise.

Our goal is to highlight innovative activity in The Park and on campus, and link you to resources that may be useful to your organization.

Spring has arrived in The Park and with it, new opportunities to get outdoors. You may have noticed new benches, tables, chairs and even an outdoor meeting area along Devall Drive. These are the result of a joint project between Auburn's industrial design students and long-time partner, PlayCore.

Auburn's collaboration with PlayCore is one of several stories of partnership highlighted in this issue. Another is our conversation with Mark Liles--a leading member of The Park community and professor of microbiology whose work in metagenomics and with colleagues from a range of disciplines has allowed for the commercialization of probiotics that protect farmed fish against deadly pathogens.


Metagenomics, probiotics, and microbes crop up thoughout this issue in connection to both a LAUNCH award-winning team and to The Park's addition of a new, cutting edge tool, the GALT Prospector, that speeds the process of mining microbiomes for beneficial bacterial strains--strains that can be used from everything to fighting drought to developing vaccines for fish. Learn how in this, our latest issue of CONVERGE.
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Thank you, again, for your role in making the Park the place where innovation begins,

Leslie Chapman
334.844.6147
Amsterdam Cafe Food Truck wins Plainsman's Choice Award

For the fourth year in a row, the 'Dam Food Truck has scooped up the Plainsman's Choice Award for Best Food Truck on Campus. But the food truck isn't the only place to find this local favorite.

A new brick and mortar location is now open in the Research and Innovation Center at 540 Devall Drive. Located on the first floor, Amsterdam Café at The Park offers opportunities for safe, socially-distant indoor and outdoor dining, as well as online ordering and pick-up. Currently open from 11:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, the café has recently expanded its menu to include tacos, taco bowls, quesadillas and nachos.

In a hurry? Order Online or call: 334-209-6397
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