Spotlight on innovation players   

The University of Montpellier and its 15 partners in the I-SITE MUSE "Montpellier Université d'Excellence" project organized, with the support of the Occitanie Region, an afterwork dedicated to innovation on Tuesday, September 7, 2021 at the Jardin des Plantes in Montpellier. In the presence of Hind Emad, Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole's Vice President for Economic and Digital Development, UM President Philippe AUGÉ congratulated the winners of the MUSE 2020 Innovation Prize, researchers who have particularly distinguished themselves in the emergence of ideas that have opened up new economic, technological or societal avenues for new uses.

The MUSE Innovation Award to promote new ideas

Since 2018, Project MUSE has established an Innovation Award to honor researchers, teacher-researchers and staff from institutions within the MUSE perimeter who are at the heart of innovative approaches.

The jury for the second edition of the Innovation Prize, chaired by Christophe DERAIL, Vice-President of Valorization and Technology Transfer at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, took place on Friday, October 16, 2020. A total of 21 applications were received from the five Montpellier Université d'Excellence research clusters. At the end of the deliberations, the jury selected the five most outstanding applications in terms of the impact, innovative nature and recentness of the innovation presented.

The five winners of the MUSE 2020 Innovation Awards are :

  • Claude GRISON, Director of UMR ChimEco, for her research into ecocatalysis, a key technology in ecology and industrial green chemistry, to create ecological, economic and social value from scientific results.
  • Franck MOLINA, Director of UMR Sys2diag, for his work in designing laboratory-free diagnostic test methods, and more specifically for his invention of the first salivary test for SARS-coV 2 EASYCOV.
  • Mikhael BECHELANY, researcher at the European Membrane Institute (IEM ), for his work on multifunctional inorganic membranes, and in particular their applications in the fields of energy, the environment and health.
  • Philippe POIGNET, Director of the Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Robotique et de Micro-électronique de Montpellier (LIRMM), for his work on retinal surgery, and more specifically on a medical device incorporating a robot to assist microsurgery. This remotely-operated macro-micro robotic platform enables safer, more precise surgical procedures.
  • Simon de CHARENTENAY, lecturer at the Centre d'Études et de Recherches Comparatives Constitutionnelles et Politiques (CERCOP), for his work on the legal theory and practice of the Block Chain.

The 2021 Innovation Awards launched

This festive afterwork, organized to encourage exchanges between researchers and players in the innovation ecosystem, was an opportunity to announce the launch of a new edition of the Innovation Awards. Registration for the 2021 edition is now open, and applications can be submitted online from the MUSE I-SITE project website before October 22, 2021. Following a file-based selection process, 5 winners from the MUSE research clusters will receive a personal prize of €3,000.