Ania Jayich, SomaLogic Part of New NSF Convergence Accelerator Award

Quantum Foundry co-director Professor Ania Jayich and Quantum Foundry Industrial Advisory Board company SomaLogic have been awarded a new grant titled “High-Throughput Proteomics Technology Based on Quantum Sensing”. The project is part of the NSF Convergence Accelerator Track C and will be led out of the University of Chicago by Professor Peter Maurer. The project aims to pave the way to establish quantum technology as a critical tool in biomedicine, and specifically for proteomic devices, which are used to map the protein profile of a given cell, tissue, and or/organism. The team hopes to demonstrate how quantum sensing – based on the exceptional sensitivity of nitrogen vacancy (NV) color centers in diamond – can impact and alter diagnostics and biomedical research.

To deliver tangible solutions that have a nation-wide societal impact and at a faster pace, the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched the Convergence Accelerator program, designed to leverage a convergence approach to transition basic research and discovery into practice. Using innovation processes like human-centered design, user discovery, and team science; and integration of multidisciplinary research, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), and partnerships; the Convergence Accelerator is making timely investments to solve high-risk societal challenges through use-inspired convergence research.

Each Convergence Accelerator research topic involves a two-phase approach to ensure the selected teams and funded use-inspired convergence research are proactively and intentionally managed. Phase one beings as a nine-month planning effort. Funding up to $1 million is provided to further develop the initial concept, identify new team members, participate in innovation curriculum, and develop an initial prototype. The innovation curriculum consists of training in human-centered design, team science activities, inter-team communications, pitch preparation, and presentation coaching—all of which are essential components of the Accelerator’s model. This training helps the teams to better prepare for success in the next phase. At the end of phase one, each team participates in a pitch competition and a proposal evaluation. Selected teams from phase one will proceed to phase two, with potential funding up to $5 Million for 24 months.

Over the next nine months, the awarded teams will work to build a proof-of-concept for their solutions by leveraging multidisciplinary expertise, innovation processes, and cross-cutting partnerships between academia, non-profits, government, industry, and other sectors. Throughout phase one of Convergence Accelerator 2020, the research teams will utilize fundamentals from the Convergence Accelerator’s model and curriculum to include— human-centered design thinking, team science, early-stage prototyping, pitch preparation, and most importantly use-inspired research, which includes the end-user early in the design process—to ensure the solutions have significant national impact.