Open Minds 2012

The Open Minds video Competition

Congratulations to our video competition winners! Earth2Block's video was recognized for Greatest Social Impact Innovation AND Strong Arm Ergonomic Lifting Safety System's video was recognized for Best Pitch Delivery. Both teams won $1,000 each to help further their ventures.

The Judges

Thank you to our distinguished panel of judges for for the 2012 video competition:

Dr. Robert Lemelson, The Lemelson Foundation
Robert Lemelson, Ph.D., is co-Vice President and Secretary of The Lemelson Foundation. Rob is an anthropologist who received his M.A. from the University of Chicago, and Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology, UCLA. He was a Fulbright scholar in Indonesia in 1996-1997, has conducted research for the World Health Organization, and is additionally trained as a clinical psychologist. His area of specialty is Southeast-Asian Studies, psychological anthropology and transcultural psychiatry. He is currently a research anthropologist at the Semel Institute of Neuroscience at UCLA He is also the president and founder of The Foundation for Psychocultural Research, a non-profit research foundation supporting research and training in the neurosciences and social sciences. In addition, Dr. Lemelson is the director of Elemental Productions, a documentary film production company.

Karen Clune, USAID, Global Health Fellows Program II
Karen Clune is the Innovation Advisor in the Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact in the Bureau for Global Health at USAID. In that role, Karen provides technical assistance to support partnerships and innovation-related initiatives. Karen assists in identifying and developing initiatives, partnerships, and/or activities that support innovations in global health, including those with a maternal and child health focus. In addition, she provides technical assistance to the Saving Lives at Birth Grand Challenge by helping to plan subsequent global challenges in coordination with the partners and Savings Lives at Birth team members.

Prior to her fellowship, she was at USAID with IT Shows, Inc. and a Sexual and Reproductive Health Advisor with the Peace Corps in Jamaica. Karen holds a MPH degree in Global Health from George Washington University.

Calgary Brown, The Hub, Bay Area
Calgary Brown is the Event Director of Hub Bay Area, a place for purpose-driven people to connect and build solutions for a better world. So far, she has worked with over 100 local, national and global organizations and businesses that have convened and showcased their impact to audiences at the Hub.  Prior to her work with the Hub, she served as President of the NYC Professional Chapter of Net Impact; an international non-profit organization that mobilizes individuals to use the power of business to create a more socially and environmentally sustainable world. Active with the chapter for over three years, she produced high impact events and programs, working with many of New York's thought leaders and social change organizations. While involved with Net Impact, Calgary worked in the financial services industry at Moody's focusing on marketing, product strategy, and strategic communications for the company's research and financial data products.  Prior to that, she worked overseas in higher education in Dublin, Ireland and at an Internet start up company in Leipzig, Germany. Calgary is a Starting Bloc Fellow, and earned her bachelor's degree from the University of San Francisco in Business Administration majoring in International Business.

John Calvert, United States Patent and Trademark Office
John Calvert is Administrator of the Inventor Assistance Program, which includes inventor outreach and university outreach initiatives. He has expanded the Inventor Assistance Program to include educational initiatives for students, inventors and small businesses and has created inventor assistance through pro bono and pro se initiatives both inside the USPTO and through working with universities and Bar organizations.

Prior to being named Administrator, John was responsible for supervising as many as 25 examiners in the areas of textile technology and absorbent products. He also served as Acting Director for the Office of Independent Inventor Programs.

Mr. Calvert has received numerous achievement awards, including the Department of Commerce Bronze Medal for superior Federal service and the United States Patent and Trademark Office Exceptional Career Award.

Ben Schrag, National Science Foundation
Ben Schrag joined the National Science Foundation in 2009 as a Program Director in the small business programs, with responsibility in the areas of advanced materials and nanotechnology. Prior to this, he served for four years as Director of Research and Development at Micro Magnetics, where he led a development effort to commercialize a new family of high-performance magnetic microsensor products for demanding consumer and military applications. Before this, he served as manager of the metrology group at Micro Magnetics, directing an engineering team developing a new magnetic diagnostic system for failure analysis and fault isolation in semiconductor devices. During this time, Ben also served as a visiting scientist at Brown University and as the PI on a number of federal awards, including NSF Phase I and Phase II Small Business Innovation Research projects and an Advanced Technology Program award from NIST. He received his PhD in Physics from Brown University, with a specialization in materials.

Breanna DiGiammarino, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation
At the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Breanna applies an impact-lens across the portfolio to the work of finding, selecting and supporting Draper Richards Kaplan entrepreneurs.  She also spearheads the systems infrastructure development for the Foundation as it enters a new phase of growth.

  She previously served as an Associate Consultant at The Bridgespan Group, the leading strategy consulting firm in the nonprofit sector, where she worked with many large scale nonprofit clients, including advising The Gates Foundation on their investment strategy to improve education outcomes in the U.S. and the Cristo Rey Network of schools on how to align their nationwide network with a focus on long-term student outcomes. She trained with Bain and Company, and received her Master of Public Administration in nonprofit management from the NYU Wagner School of Public Service and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Government from the University of Virginia.

Open Minds Gold Sponsor

Our Partners

A Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam
Each year, NCIIA welcomes a Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam to participate in Open Minds along with the exhibiting E-Teams. The Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam initiative is a national grants program designed to excite the next generation of inventors and problem solvers through hands-on learning, while encouraging an inventive culture in high schools and communities. Teams showcase their prototypes at EurekaFest, an annual celebration of the inventive spirit presented by the Lemelson-MIT Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus in Cambridge, Mass. Learn more about the Lemselson MIT program and InvenTeams at: http://web.mit.edu/invent/index.html.
 
This year's InvenTeam is the Harker Innovation Team. The team is developing an Aquatic Thermoelectric Generator to produce energy from heat, the “energy graveyard.” The device floats on water, and reflector panels focus sunlight onto a black surface that converts solar energy to heat. This heat is then passed through thermoelectric panels and passively dissipated into the surrounding water. Harnessing the thermal gradient between the hot surface and the cold water, the thermoelectric panels generate significant amounts of electricity that can be used for commercial or residential purposes. In this way, the team's floating thermoelectric generator passively generates electricity from solar heat, essentially a solar farm on water.
 

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 Oklahoma State University

To improve the survivability of troops in combat situations, the best gear, weapons, and training are required. One piece of equipment that can come between a soldier’s life and death is body armor. But while modern body armor has advanced enough to resist bullets, Behind Armor Blunt Trauma (BABT)--non-penetrating injuries resulting from high kinetic energy transfer--can still do serious damage to a soldier’s body. According to the United States Department of Defense, approximately 35,000 military personnel were injured in the Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001, with 20% of these due to gunshot-related injuries. A majority of the gunshot injuries were caused by BABT.

MetCel is developing a Hybrid Composite Armor (HCA), stand-alone insert that is capable of significantly reducing BABT. It is a combination of current top-of-the-line armor-grade materials and an advanced alloy honeycomb collapsible layer. Preliminary tests indicate the technology could reduce BABT by 25%. In addition, the HCA insert is lightweight and offers a multi-hit feature.