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Article | Mathematics and Computer Science

Researchers receive funding from UChicago Innovation Fund

Navipoint Genomics, LLC, and Praedictus Climate Solutions have been awarded funding by the University of Chicago Innovation Fund to build new technology for healthcare and agriculture.

The fund provides early-stage investment support for startups and proof-of-concept work for projects developed by students, faculty, and staff at the University of Chicago.

Navipoint Genomics, LLD is an innovative genomics analysis platform that enables high-performance, reliable, and secure data transfer and large-scale analysis of genomics datasets. Using the Innovation Fund award of $175,000, the team plans to take the prototype platform to the next step in commercializing the technology: building a Software-as-a-Service” platform secure enough to use in clinical practice.

Navipoint’s technology will allow researchers to transfer and analyze full human genomes 50 to 100 times faster, dramatically reducing the time for large-scale analysis from months to days,” said Ravi Madduri, product manager in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) Division and senior fellow at the Computation Institute (CI). Other Navipoint team members are Paul Davé, Dina Sulakhe, and Alex Rodriguez.

Praedictus Climate Solutions will receive $125,000 to develop new software tools for more accurate and timely projections of crop yields. The research team includes Ian Foster, Joshua Elliott, and David Kelly, all from the  Center for Robust Decision-Making on Climate and Energy Policy at the CI; they will be joined in this project by Robert Okabe.

We use cloud computing to analyze multi-terabyte climate and biophysical data,” said Foster, senior scientist in Argonne’s MCS Division and director of the CI. This new award will enable us to explore additional crops and new geographical areas. Our aim is to provide policy makers with a better understanding of crop yields.”

For further information, see the announcement by the Chicago Innovation Exchange.