White is Finalist for Innovation Transfer Award

The Champaign County Economic Development Corporation has picked Aerospace Engineering at Illinois Prof. Scott R. White as one of three finalists from among the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faculty for the organization’s Innovation Transfer Award.

Innovation Celebration 2014 recognizes individuals and organizations that have made significant contributions, taken risks, and provided leadership to ensure the continuing economic success of Champaign County, the ongoing success of the University’s economic development mission, and the growth of entrepreneurial talent and energy in the community. The Innovation Transfer Award recognizes an individual or group from the University of Illinois whose invention or work has been successfully transferred into the public shpere. Successful transfer includes a spectrum of activities ranging from forming a company, to having products on the market that are enabled by the technology, to distributing the technology for free for the public good.

Awards will be presented February 27 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The other two Urbana campus finalists are Electrical and Computer Engineering Prof. Stephen Boppart, whose research interests are biomedical imaging, bioengineering and acoustics; and Chemistry Prof. Stephen Sligar, whose interests are in biochemistry and biophysics.

White, known worldwide for pioneering the developments of self-healing and microvascular materials, directs the Autonomous Materials Systems (AMS) Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and is Chairman of Autonomic Materials, Inc. (AMI) headquartered in Champaign, Illinois. AMI provides a range of self-healing solutions to the coatings industry for use in a variety of industries including marine, energy, transportation, consumer products, and civil infrastructure.

The development corporation awarded White with the Innovation Discovery Award in 2008.