Dr. Jejal-Reddy Bathi, left, students Kara Kimes, David Brown and Landon Norman, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering Kidambi Sreenivas with the microplastics sampling device.
Whether it’s innovations in health care, transportation or solutions for healthier living, faculty members at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga are driving groundbreaking research.
To assist with their advances toward commercialization, four faculty projects are recipients of the MOCS Innovate! award, a $5,000 grant from a seed fund established by Dr. Thomas Lyons, the Clarence E. Harris Chair of Excellence in Entrepreneurship in the Gary W. Rollins College of Business, and Jennifer Skjellum, the commercialization counselor from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.
This marks the second year of the award and the first under the “MOCS Innovate!” name.
“Last year, we focused on people who were farther down the line in their research,” said Lyons, a professor of marketing and entrepreneurship at UTC. “This year, we wanted to come back and capture some people who were earlier in the pipeline and people who were more widely dispersed on campus.”
Dr. Thomas Lyons
The awardees, he said, were those looking to commercialize their invention or build a business around it.
“Helping people do that is what we do with the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” he said. “The mission of the Harris Chair is to spread entrepreneurship across the UTC campus, so I just felt like it’s my responsibility to step up here and become engaged.”
Skjellum said they awarded those who showed real potential with their projects despite potentially being early in the process.
“They needed to have something that had potential for commercialization, meaning it was novel and had value,” she said.
This award shines a light on UTC’s commitment to providing faculty opportunities, she added.
“They are pivoting, innovating and coming up with new things. That’s where you really start to see there is an innovation culture at UTC.”
Here is a look at the 2024 MOCS Innovate! award winners.
Dr. Erkan Kaplanoglu, associate professor in the Engineering Management and Technology Department, Mechatronics, and Jason McDowell, Graduate Research Assistant in Biomechatronics and Assistive Technology Lab
When Dr. Erkan Kaplanoglu came to UTC in 2019, he quickly began working alongside the physical therapy department.
Dr. Erkan Kaplanoglu
As an associate professor of mechatronics, whose work is centered on developing medically assistive devices to help those with physical disabilities, Kaplanoglu saw some needs in the department—especially with stroke victims.
“When someone has a stroke, they need physical therapy,” said Kaplanoglu, now the interim head of the Department of Engineering Management and Technology and director of the Biomechatronic and Assistive Technology Lab. “But it takes time. It’s not always covered by insurance. There are some devices that can be used for hand therapy, but it’s not easy to buy it and it’s not easy to use it.”
Kaplanoglu and Jason McDowell, a research assistant in the Biomechatronics and Assistive Technology Lab, designed a wearable device that allows patients to engage in successful hand treatment through robotic mirror therapy.
“We aimed to find a way to make therapy in home with affordable prices and easy to use,” Kaplanoglu said.
McDowell, an engineering management and technology graduate student, explained the device.
“We’re exploring a new way to control a robotic assistive device that gives us more fine-grained control of the robotic system for robotic mirror therapy,” he said. “We are using a hand tracking camera to mirror the movements of the user’s good hand to an exoskeleton glove which moves the bad/paretic hand.”
Kaplanoglu commended McDowell for his help throughout the process.
“I’m lucky that I have this kind of student,” Kaplanoglu said. “He can talk about the coding part and the designing part. We can understand each other. I never call him ‘student;’ he’s my teammate.”
The winnings will allow them to market the device and eventually make it available to patients, Kaplanoglu said.
“Our project is innovative,” he said. “UTC is not only a teaching school, but also a research school.
“We need to create a research culture to show that we can do something for people.”
Dr. Nagwan R. Zahry, associate professor in the Department of Communication
While completing her doctoral degree at Michigan State University, Dr. Nagwan Zahry focused her research on healthy eating in college students.
Intrigued by her findings, Zahry continued her research for the past six years, developing the framework for an app called “FoodConnect” designed to help college students make healthy food choices.
Dr. Nagwan Zahry
“My long-term plan,” said Zahry, an associate professor in the Department of Communication, “is to make the app accessible to all students who are at UTC so they can find information about food. Easy, accessible information that can help them decide what to eat and how to prepare healthy food that is not time-consuming.”
To further her research, she collaborated with faculty in the School of Nursing to apply different health theories and U.S. Department of Agriculture recommendations in the design of the app.
Over the last two years, she worked with three cohorts of students in the College of Engineering and Computer Science to conduct face-to-face interviews to better understand students’ perceptions about healthy eating.
“I’m interested in how the human body works,” she said, “like how nutrition can be very effective in terms of mental health, productivity and energy. I’m looking at food as a holistic idea.”
The MOCS Innovate! award will help the app come to fruition.
“This is my dream project, and I didn’t get a chance to work on it until I got to UTC,” she said, “and then I couldn’t get funded. I was just about to lose hope.
“I was super excited to hear that I got the grant. I am very grateful to Thomas and Jennifer.”
Dr. Jejal-Reddy Bathi, environmental engineering coordinator and assistant professor in civil engineering, and Dr. Sree Kidambi Sreenivas, professor in mechanical engineering
Dr. Jejal-Reddy Bathi, assistant professor in civil engineering, and Dr. Kidambi Sreenivas, professor in mechanical engineering, have spent a lot of time in the lab with their graduate students working on microplastic pollution projects.
“For them, it was very laborious,” said Bathi, who is also UTC’s environmental engineering coordinator. “They had to wait for a rain event to collect samples. It did not give enough data in a rapid manner so that we can inform the community.”
Dr. Jejal-Reddy Bathi
This inspired Bathi and Sreenivas to work alongside their students to develop a device to sample and track microplastics more accurately and efficiently.
The device will allow its users to process a smaller sample in the field with automated processes, thus reducing errors in the data and providing consistency in data collection across a variety of scenarios.
“Our focus is understanding the level of microplastics in the environment,” Bathi said. “It’s challenging with ill-fitted equipment or the sampling protocols that we have. To fill that gap to be able to better track microplastics in the environment, we came up with this idea.”
As he went over with his students all the locations where microplastics have been discovered––from human arteries to Antarctica—Sreenivas stressed the significance of keeping track of them.
“We are all drinking this water and that’s the bottom line,” Sreenivas said. “We really don’t know what’s in our water, especially microplastics.”
With the grant, Bathi and Sreenivas will be able to make a fully functional prototype with all the working parts, which could further their knowledge of microplastics in ecosystems.
“What kind of treatment techniques we should be designing and implementing in the field is very fundamental information,” Bathi said. “This helps. If we can process samples and get this information quicker, which is what our aim is in making this, we can feed that information into our engineering designs.”
Austin Harris, director of operations and chief engineer, UTC Research Institute
Austin Harris, the UTC Research Institute director of operations and chief engineer, is at the forefront of a project focused on revolutionizing transportation management systems.
The management system is cloud-based, meaning it operates entirely online. It will integrate non-connected and connected road users––those who can exchange data with other vehicles and roadside infrastructure––through connected Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS).
Austin Harris
Harris said his research aligns closely with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s 10-year plan to equip a significant portion of intersections nationwide with connected vehicle infrastructure.
“The end goal with these funds is to develop an integration method for non-connected road users, enabling them to receive the same benefits and awareness that connected road users do,” he said. “It’s really focused on the safety layer of this transportation management system.”
Harris noted there was never an exact start date for the research, given its ongoing nature to accelerate the deployment of the transportation management system’s connected vehicle data integration component.
“It’s a cumulation of knowledge on seeing how cities operate and how automated vehicles operate,” he said.
To Harris, securing this grant holds significant importance in transportation research on and off campus.
“Technology transfer and commercialization is a huge part of research,” he said. “Any way we can encourage researchers to take that next step right into commercialization is a huge benefit for not just the research community, but also the University.”
Learn More
Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Clarence E. Harris Chair of Excellence
Department of Engineering Management and Technology
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Biomechatronics and Assistive Technology Lab
