UMass Presence at Annual Grinspoon Awards

On April 25, eight ventures led by current UMass students and one UMass alum were recognized at the 15^th annual Grinspoon Entrepreneurship Initiative Awards event in Holyoke, Mass.

Co-founder of FogKicker, a high performance anti-fog solution, BDIC alum Marc Gammell was presented with the Grinspoon, Garvey and Young Alumni Award. A previous winner of a Grinspoon Entrepreneurial Spirit Award, Gammell and his business partners, UMass alum Yingyong Li and UMass professor Ken Carter, have been featured on the TODAY show, Adventure Capitalists and Nature Knows Best.

Pickmeup Snacks (Elvan Cavac, chemistry PhD candidate), Fireflight (Roy Chan, CICS MS candidate; Bryan Chua, environmental science and engineering; Nick Duenas, engineering), FootCare by Nurses (Kate Clayton-Jones, nursing PhD candidate), Pioneer Valley Virtual Reality (Christopher Fonte, BDIC), Face Lock (Michael Keegan, CICS; Peter Tao, biochemistry and molecular biology), Aclarity, LLC (Julie Mullen, engineering PhD candidate; Barrett Mully, MBA candidate), TernBooking (Austin Rohlfing, mathematics) and eBiologics (Alexander Smith, engineering PhD candidate) were presented with Grinspoon Entrepreneurial Spirit Awards.

eBiologics ($35,000), Face Lock ($4,250) and TernBooking ($3,500) are all cash prize winners from Berthiaume Center’s 2017-18 Innovation Challenge. Aclarity, LLC won $26,000 at the 2017 Innovation Challenge Final and was recently awarded $65,000 from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s (MassCEC) Catalyst program. Pickmeup Snacks, Fireflight, FootCare by Nurses and Pioneer Valley Virtual Reality have also competed in various rounds of the Innovation Challenge.