Solar cell inventor Stuart Wenham has won the top prize at the 2009 Inventor of the Year awards hosted by New South Innovations, UNSW’s technology commercialisation company.

Professor Wenham is a world-leading solar cell inventor who heads UNSW’s ARC Photovoltaic Centre of Excellence. In a career spanning more than a quarter century, he has invented or co-invented eight suites of solar cell technologies that have been licensed to solar cell makers around the world.

Companies that have licensed UNSW solar technology include world leading solar makers such as Suntech-Power, BP Solar, and Samsung. These companies have annual production volumes valued at hundreds of millions of dollars in an industry that is now the world’s fastest-growing energy sector.

The NSi Inventor of the Year awards reward innovative technologies of UNSW researchers and students that benefit the community and the environment. This is the first year of the awards, which carry a total prize pool of $20,000. One hundred and twenty leaders from business, media and research organisations attended the 23 April awards event. The gala evening was held at UNSW’s John Niland Scientia Building and emceed by James O’Loghlin, host of ABC TV’s The New Inventors.

Eleven UNSW inventors were short-listed as finalists across four inventor award categories – biomedicine, science and engineering, the environment, and information and communication technology. The winners of each award category were nominees for the overall Inventor of the Year award.

Professor Wenham said he was surprised to be named NSI Inventor of the Year: “The standard of excellence among the finalists at these awards was first class and I’m humbled to have been chosen top inventor. I think the focus of these awards upon commercialisation is encouraging to researchers who want to make a market impact that goes a step beyond basic and applied research.”

In June Professor Wenham will head to the US to receive the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ William Cherry Award for outstanding contributions to the advancement of photovoltaic science and technology. In addition to the Inventor of the Year award, Professor Wenham also won the Environment inventor award.

UNSW Professor Philip Hogg won the Biomedicine inventor award for devising a drug that could stop tumours by "starving” them to death. Known as GSAO, it stops cancer cells from proliferating by preventing the growth of new blood vessels. The drug is in clinical trials with Cancer Research UK.

Professor Hogg has also pioneered a test that reveals whether conventional chemotherapy is effective by telling, within a day or two of the commencement of therapy, whether cancer cells are dying. This is much faster than current methods, which can take weeks or months to tell whether therapy is effective. The drug is being developed by Covidien Limited. Professor Hogg heads the UNSW Cancer Research Centre in the Faculty of Medicine.

Professor David Taubman won the Information and communication technology inventor award for his image and video compression software. Known as KakaduTM the program permits the rapid transfer of massive image and video files.

The capture and transfer of massive image and video files is pushing the capacity of platforms such as 3G phones, cameras, computers and the Internet. Before long, the growth of digital image and video data will overwhelm our ability to benefit from it.

Kakadu software solves this challenge by letting users view an entire low-quality image or video while downloading a tiny fraction of the file. By selecting a specific item of interest, such as a tumour, a user can generate a high quality image by progressively downloading more data bits from the source. NewSouth Innovations has licensed Kakadu software to hundreds of companies around the world, including Google, Disney and Warner Bros. Professor Taubman heads the Telecommunications Research Group at UNSW’s Faculty of Engineering.

Professor Veena Sahajwalla won the Science and Engineering inventor award for her polymer-injection technology that is diverting rubber and plastic from waste streams and recycling them into steel. Australian steelmaker OneSteel has licensed the technology from NewSouth Innovations and successfully trialled it at its Sydney and Melbourne electric-arc furnace steelmaking plants. OneSteel estimates that its use alone of the technology has the potential to divert 300,000 car tyres from landfill. Professor Sahajwalla heads UNSW’s Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology in the Science Faculty.

“The NSi Inventor of the year awards recognise and reward the best and brightest commercialised technologies to come out of UNSW in the past year,” said NSi Chief Executive, Mark Bennett, “I am delighted that the awards have generated such widespread interest and support across the university and I acknowledge and thank the excellence and effort put in by our inventors, the UNSW executive and our sponsors.”


MEDIA CONTACT
Dan Gaffney, NewSouth innovations, 0411 156 015 d.gaffney@nsinnovations.com.au