Academics

Eberly College of Science to host entrepreneurship seminars during Startup Week

The college will host a series of five seminars, to be presented by alumni, faculty and student entrepreneurs

Credit: Penn StateCreative Commons

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As part of Penn State Startup Week, April 1-5, the Eberly College of Science will host a series of five seminars on entrepreneurship, on the University Park campus.

All sessions will be moderated by Beth Johnson, Penn State class of 2013, intellectual property and technology transfer liaison in the Eberly College of Science's Office for Innovation.

More information about each presenter is available below the schedule.

Schedule

Tuesday, April 2

"Steller Innovations: Challenging an industry status quo through disruptive innovation"

1:35-2:50 p.m., 109 Osmond Laboratory

Steller Innovations LLC is a regional startup company that manufactures their own patented, innovative hardwood flooring and sells directly to consumers. The team is comprised of a group of life sciences grads from Penn State, and they are enthusiastic to develop new technology, to create sustainable solutions to complex problems, and to invest in marketing efforts that educate consumers.

  • Evan Stover, inventor and president, Steller Innovations LLC
  • Britta Teller, sales and communications director, Steller Innovations LLC
  • Megan Huffstickler, creative director, Steller Innovations LLC

Wednesday, April 3

"Steller Innovations: What's old is new again: How to market new products in mature industries like hardwood flooring"

1:25-3:20 p.m., 215 Armsby Building

  • Evan Stover, inventor and president, Steller Innovations LLC
  • Britta Teller, sales and communications director, Steller Innovations LLC
  • Megan Huffstickler, creative director, Steller Innovations LLC

Thursday, April 4

"Moichor: The story of how a science-inspired idea became a student startup"

4:35-5 p.m., 105 Wartik Laboratory

After living together in a Penn State special living option known as BIOME, Steve Flanagan and Matthew Chen were approached by Shevy Karbasi with an idea to make complete blood count testing more practical. With this, Moichor was founded with the help of Happy Valley LaunchBox, the Summer Founders Program, and Y Combinator's Startup School. Moichor aims to alleviate the problems that chemotherapy patients face, by allowing complete blood counts to be done on a smartphone. Moichor is able to monitor white blood cell counts from home, cut costly lab subscription fees for small clinics, and streamline collected data to pharmaceutical companies.

  • Shevy Karbasi, co-founder, business development, Moichor
  • Steve Flanagan, co-founder, user research and testing, Moichor
  • Matthew Chen, co-founder, research and development, Moichor

Friday, April 5

Kramer Industries, Inc.

11:15 a.m.-12:05 p.m., 160 Willard Building

Kramer Industries, Inc., sells equipment and supplies to companies and individuals that need to change the finish on any type of metal, plastic, or wood part or modify almost any type of surface. Kramer was founded in 1911 and re-started and built by Steven Schneider over the past 20 years.

  • Steven Schneider, CEO, Kramer Industries, Inc.

"From problem to promise: A journey of turning advances in the laboratory into a business"

12:20-1:10 p.m., 117 Osmond Laboratory

Magnitude Instruments LLC provides innovative solutions for high-sensitivity, low noise transient absorption spectroscopy. They specialize in time-resolved vibrational spectroscopy (TRIR) as well as transient absorption spectroscopy in the UV, visible, and near-infrared spectral regions.

  • John Asbury, co-founder and chief scientific officer, Magnitude Instruments LLC; associate professor of chemistry, Penn State

About the presenters

Beth Johnson holds a bachelor of science in biology and a doctorate in entomology, and she has research expertise in the fields of chemical ecology, microbiology, and plant biology. She draws upon her background in academia and direct experience in generating intellectual property to support researchers in the Eberly College of Science during all stages of the technology transfer process, from intellectual property (IP) capture and protection to licensing and commercialization.

Evan Stover graduated from Penn State in 2011 with a bachelor of science in biology and started his own consulting business as a partnership with his father, Lee Stover. Together they consulted for small and large wood products companies. In the process of this work, Stover developed the hardwood flooring technology that allows hardwood floors to be instantly installed and removed. The technology became the foundation for Steller Innovations LLC, which now manufactures and sells hardwood flooring directly to customers from a wood shop in central Pennsylvania. In his current position, Stover continues to innovate in manufacturing to produce high-quality flooring products using sustainable methods.

Britta Teller completed her doctorate in ecology at Penn State in 2014. As an avid biologist, Teller took a keen interest in Stover’s consulting work in the wood products industry while concurrently pursuing her postdoc and assistant teaching professorship at Penn State. In 2018, Teller joined Steller Innovations full-time to assist in the direction of the company’s strategic positioning, sales, and communications. In her current position, she regularly uses the skills she developed in ecology, including statistical analysis, hypothesis testing, and adaptive decision-making to improve company processes.

Megan Huffstickler completed her masters in educational psychology at Penn State in 2018. In her current position with Steller Innovations, she uses her background in education and chemistry to develop web and social media content that educates consumers about hardwood flooring from the tree to home care. In the near future, she is looking forward to working with other companies to implement similar strategies that help their customers understand their products with storytelling, education, and content that describes the science behind their businesses.

Shevy Karbasi, a 2019 Penn State graduate, leads business development at Moichor. He works with current partners and looks for new potential partners.

Steve Flanagan, a 2019 Penn State graduate, handles user research and testing as well as application/product/website design at Moichor. Through more than 200 user tests, hundreds of one-on-one interviews, 12 iterations of the application, and countless amounts of surveys, the team has been able to fully understand what patients are going through. Along the journey, Flanagan has learned wet lab techniques, networking tactics, user-interface development, and customer research skills needed to move the company forward.

Matthew Chen, a 2019 Penn State graduate, handles the research and development of Moichor. This ranges from wet lab techniques to hardware development. Chen has gained expertise through experience and advisers. All of Moichor’s hardware and research development is handled in house.

John Asbury is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Penn State and co-founder and chief scientific officer of NanoSpec Instruments LLC. NanoSpec got its start because Asbury proposed experiments to the U.S. Department of Energy that could not be done with existing technology. His graduate students and co-founders of NanoSpec had to reimagine what transient absorption spectroscopy should be in order to achieve those program goals. That work, and the innovations that followed, have been translated into ultrahigh-sensitivity transient absorption instruments that are opening new areas of research and development in areas ranging from from catalyst discovery to in-line process control and quality assurance.

Last Updated April 5, 2019