and one of the judges for this year's
competition said: "Our commitment to
student entrepreneurship is a vital part of our
approach to commercialisation of graphene.
"The inspiration and expertise provided by Eli
Harari combined with the scientific excellence
of our graphene research gives today's
winners the opportunity to have a jump-start
on the path to creating a significant business.
I wish them every success!"
Christian has just successfully completed his
4 year PhD researching into Graphene-based
sensors with a particular focus on pressure
sensors and fabrication techniques and
provides the manufacturing and material
expertise. While Daniel, who is in his final year
of his PhD also researching graphene-based
sensors, is able to bring this and 6 years' worth
of experience in electronic instrumentation to
the design of the electronics and processing
that will be needed.
The winners are looking to develop an
innovative range of new sensors and
actuators based a patented technology of
single layer graphene films supported by a
thin flexible polymeric membrane.
The new technology has a range of
applications beyond the one presented to
the judges and in order to start explore the
full potential of this exciting technology,
Christian and his PhD supervisor, Dr Aravind
Vijayaraghavan setup Atomic Mechanics
Ltd, a spin-out company from the University.
Daniel has since joined the company as
Lead Engineer.
Anyone wishing to find out more about
this year's prize should e-mail enterprise@
manchester.ac.uk for further information.
Further information
The award is co-funded by the North
American Foundation for The University of
Manchester through the support of one
of the University's former physics students
Dr Eli Harari (founder of SanDisk) and his
wife Britt. It recognises the role that high-
level, flexible early-stage financial support
can play in the successful development of a
business targeting the full commercialisation
of a product or technology related to
research in graphene.
Christian and Daniel will receive continued
support to help take the first steps towards
realising this project and are already
enrolled onto UMIP's Innovation Optimiser
programme as well as working closely with
Andrew Wilkinson of Graphene Enabled in
order to help them to better engage with
the market in order to better understand
the best opportunities to fulfil.
Anyone interested in finding out more
about Christian and Aravind's research work
should refer to the following papers:
C. Berger et al, Touch-mode capacitive
pressure sensor with graphene-polymer
heterostructure membrane, 2D Materials,
Accepted Manuscript (2017)
http://iopscience.iop.org/
article/10.1088/2053-1583/aa8c8a
C. Berger, M. Dirschka, A. Vijayaraghavan,
Ultra-thin graphene-polymer
heterostructure membranes, Nanoscale,
2016,8, 17928-17939
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/
articlelanding/2016/nr/
c6nr06316k#!divAbstract
A new technology that could be used for a wide range of
applications including mass market consumer electronics
