News Release

Pacific Northwest Staff Win National Awards For Transferring Research To Industry

Grant and Award Announcement

DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

RICHLAND, Wash. -- Sixteen staff members working with three technologies developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have won 1998 Awards for Excellence in Technology Transfer from the Federal Laboratory Consortium. The FLC gives up to 30 of the highly sought-after awards each year to teams of federal lab employees for their success in transferring their research to private industry. Pacific Northwest received the awards for transferring and commercializing an advanced soil remediation technology and two innovative software products.

Theresa Bergsman, Janet Roberts, Rick Brouns and Doug McKinley transferred the Six-Phase Soil Heating technology that was developed for the Department of Energy as a faster, cheaper way to remediate contaminated soils. The winning team recognized the marketability of SPSH as an enhancement to a proven, commercially accepted technology for removing volatile organic contaminants from soils. In May 1997, the team formed a limited liability corporation called Current Environmental Solutions, owned jointly by Pacific Northwest's operator, Battelle, and TerraVac Corp. of Irvine, Calif. CES and TerraVac collaborate on projects, creating an incentive for both companies to provide the most cost-effective approach for clients.

Walter Hensley, David McKinnon, Mark Panisko and former Pacific Northwest staff Rodney Savard and Phil Pulver developed and transferred Nuclide NavigatorTM, a PC-based software tool for retrieving, displaying and managing large quantities of nuclear data, to EG&G ORTEC, Oak Ridge, Tenn. The software contains a unique, comprehensive on-line collection of gamma-, alpha- and beta-ray information. Nuclide Navigator's unique "one-stop-shopping" feature for nuclear isotope information simplifies and furthers worldwide nuclear research--from pharmaceutical and medical applications to chemistry, nuclear weapons verification and nuclear power plant construction and operation. Nuclide NavigatorTM is currently the best-selling software EG&G ORTEC has ever licensed or developed.

A trailblazing new software transferred by Renie McVeety, Jim Thomas, Jerry Work, Marv Erickson, Shawn Bohn, Mark Pottier and Kelly Pennock changes the way people retrieve and analyze text information by presenting the information in a visual format. The software, called SPIRE for Spatial Paradigm for Information Retrieval and Exploration, directly addresses information overload by quickly analyzing large volumes of text, documents, web pages, etc., and displaying related documents and themes as star topic clusters in a night sky and/or themes within terrain maps. Following immense interest in the software's capabilities by industry, Battelle partnered with the Smaby Group of Minneapolis, Minn., to form a new company, ThemeMedia Inc., Redmond, Wash., to market and sell the software.

The FLC award nominations are judged by a panel of experts in the field of technology transfer, including representatives from industry, state and local government, academia and the federal laboratories. Pacific Northwest leads the other DOE laboratories in winning these awards with a total of 39 since 1984.

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