Plastics and food technology get grants totaling $4.55 million
Archived article from Feb 1, 2002
By Joseph Blumberg
The New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology has awarded two research excellence grants to Rutgers, totaling $4.55 million, for projects involving plastics and food technology. The School of Engineering will receive $2.35 million, and $2.2 million is coming to the Center for Advanced Food Technology at Cook College. The commission also awarded $150,000 to the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials at Rutgers.
"Our success in attaining these grants recognizes both the proven capabilities of our faculty in conducting rigorous scientific research and our demonstrated ability to transfer resulting technologies to the private sector for the benefit of the people of New Jersey," said Joseph J. Seneca, university vice president for academic affairs.
Thomas Nosker, assistant research professor, and Richard Lehman, professor at the School of Engineering, the principal investigators on the $2.35 million grant-funded project, will collaborate with other researchers at Rutgers, as well as scientists from Princeton and Washington and Lee universities. They will form a research center dedicated to developing advanced materials based on immiscible polymer blends (IMPBs). Their five-year research plan builds upon work during the past decade that has yielded the highly successful transfer of IMPB technology to the commercial sector, such as the development at Rutgers of environmentally friendly plastic lumber and railroad ties.
Robert Rosen of the Center for Advanced Food Technology and the food science department is the principal investigator on the project funded by the $2.2 million grant. A multidisciplinary team of food scientists, chemists, biologists, geneticists, engineers and physicians will research processing conditions that could enhance anti-inflammatory factors in foods, herbs and spices. Such technology could be used to treat inflammatory diseases such as arthritis.
A $150,000 grant from the commission was made to the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials, a consortium of Rutgers, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and the New Jersey Institute of Technology directed by Board of Governor Professor of Chemistry Joachim Kohn. The grant supplements a $600,000, three-year National Science Foundation award in the Partnerships for Innovation program. Both grants support the center's project "Models for Better Academic-Industrial Partnerships to Create Value from Concepts," which seeks to evaluate new models for combining academic and industrial resources to develop underutilized university and industry intellectual property.
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