Grant: Idea to Innovation

This grant will support several activities related to the commercialization of technology enabling the rapid interpretation of complex chemical data to improve the efficiencies and capabilities of the end-user laboratories. One user group is forensic laboratories analyzing fire debris for arson investigations. Current data analysis requires 1-4 person hours of time to interpret the data. We have algorithms that can be used to perform this task in seconds. This grant will permit us to develop a commercial software prototype. In the forensic laboratory, using our software will improve the efficiencies for the entire laboratory as scientists will be able to devote more of their time to processing other samples and less of their time to interpreting results from arson investigations. We will also conduct research to expand the range of ignitable liquids that can be identified by our software. Currently, we can only detect gasoline, but through this research we will improve our simulation of fire debris so that we can train our model to automatically detect other, less common ignitable liquids.A second application area that will be investigated is the identification of bacterial strains. Recent advances in chemical analysis instrumentation have provided technologies that can be used to rapidly identify bacteria in, for example, food or water. Using this approach it is relatively quick and inexpensive to identify a bacteria such as E. coli in a sample. However, the existing tools cannot differentiate between different strains of bacteria. Being able to identify the strain of bacteria is critical for assessing the risk of the bacteria. With E. coli, for example, there are harmless strains and there are strains that cause illness or even death. We will grow a series of well-characterized bacterial strains to generate a data set upon which we can test our algorithms on this challenge.