By Rebecca Lurye
The Hartford Courant
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) The $25,000 Rothberg Catalyzer Prize is part of the scientist and businessman’s effort to forge a path in the growing field of artificial intelligence.
The Hartford Courant
Jonathan Rothberg, a New Haven serial entrepreneur whose advancements of DNA sequencing earned him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, is offering a new prize at his alma mater, Yale University, and four other universities to encourage students to develop smart, industry-disrupting medical devices.
The $25,000 Rothberg Catalyzer Prize is part of the scientist and businessman’s effort to forge a path in the growing field of artificial intelligence.
It began about four years ago when Rothberg founded a medical device accelerator in Guilford, 4Catalyzer. One of his companies there, Butterfly Network, raised more than $100 million to produce a handheld ultrasound scanner that pairs with an iPhone.
The $2,000 device, which became commercially available to healthcare providers this year, is FDA-cleared for 13 clinical applications, including diagnostic imaging of the abdomen, heart and bones.
Another company in Rothberg’s accelerator, LAM Therapeutics, has raised nearly $100 million for its operations to improve drug development for patients with cancer and rare diseases using artificial intelligence.
The Rothberg Catalyzer Prize will help fund students’ ideas at Yale, Brown, Carnegie Mellon and Penn.
At Yale, the prize will join four other existing $25,000 awards managed by the university’s Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking, which span from health and education to sustainability and equality.
Applications for the prizes are due March 28. Finalists will be announced April 10 and winners will be selected later that month during the Startup Yale 2018, April 16-20.
