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Welcome back to the Research Park Chronicles as we continue to cover the wide ranging and extraordinary work being done in the park itself. Recently the Research Park has established a phenomenal program that is designed to house innovative start ups who are are the cutting edge of the emerging “clean tech” space. The Spark Innovation Center, which is housed in the park, is home to two unprecedented programs, the Spark Cleantech Accelerator and the Spark Incubator Program.
While the Accelerator is just now getting off the ground, and loaded with potential, the Incubator currently houses a handful of companies that are making technological leaps and bounds, all under the guidance of John Bruck, the Director of the Spark Innovation Center. For this episode we sat down with John and two of the companies that are working in the center. SkyNano, which is lead by CEO and founder Dr. Anna Douglas, is creating ways to change in the mind boggling space of carbon capture. EONIX and its CTO and founder Don DeRosa are revolutionizing the ways we stabilize lithium batteries, which are crucial to a clean future!
In this episode we cover:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:01:25 - Tom Rogers on the Spark Innovation Center
00:02:57 - John Bruck introduces Spark’s work
00:07:50 - The Spark Innovation Cleantech Programs
00:10:26 - Dr. Anna Douglas and SkyNano
00:19:00 - Don DeRosa and EONIX
00:26:33 - Working with the local community and the University of Tennessee
00:29:35 - John and Tom on what is to come
Research Park Chronicles with Rickey McCallum explores the incredible innovation that’s taking place at the University of Tennessee Research Park. Find out why the research institute has become the gateway to collaboration between the University of Tennessee, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the private sector—helping unleash Knoxville’s entrepreneurial spirit while opening up amazing opportunities to organizations around the world.
Rickey McCallum: Welcome back to The Research Park Chronicles podcast, where we’re documenting the exciting innovations of the University of Tennessee Research Park. I’m your host, Rickey McCallum. For this episode, we’re looking into the progressive and inspiring work being done at the Spark Innovation Center, which is currently housed inside the university’s Institute for Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Facility at the Research Park. Spark Innovation Center focuses on entrepreneurship development and commercialization of regional technology-based startup companies. With a focus on clean technologies, a space in which Knoxville was rated as the 16th cleantech hub in the country, Spark has quickly become a significant contributor to the efforts here in the East Tennessee region.
The Spark Innovation Center is designed to be a place where selected startups come to meet some of their fundamental needs, primarily those looking for wet lab space, or sophisticated prototyping shops, with capabilities for providing high-level mentorship in business model development, financial planning, and investor readiness at its core. As a result, these young startups have access to some of the best entrepreneurial leadership the university has to offer. One of the leaders in the center is Tom Rogers, CEO of the UT Research Park, who sat down with us to give an overview of the Spark Innovation Center, its mission, and its purpose.
Tom Rogers: I became completely convinced that working with entrepreneurs, helping them find ways to take new ideas to the marketplace is a key to success in our local economy. We’re blessed with a national laboratory, our Research 1 university, a culture of ideas being valued, and putting together a support structure around that has really great potential for the future of this region. So, I think a lot of the challenges that entrepreneurs face is interaction with potential customers, spending time doing customer discovery, understanding, will the dogs eat the dog food? We have a lot of great technology around here and I’ve seen hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs talk with great passion about what they do and their little gizmo, and ‘look, it works’ without ever considering, does it solve a need in the marketplace? And that’s really one of the primary things that we emphasize, not just here at Spark, but in the other business accelerators in the region as well. Try to get real. Try to understand that your idea may be the greatest thing in the world, but if customers aren’t going to buy it, it’s not going to be a successful company.
Rickey McCallum: With a passion for getting early tech companies off the ground, the Spark Innovation Center and its programs are proving to be the perfect place for the region to manifest itself as a leader in tech. Another key figure in this regard is John Bruck, the director of the Spark Innovation Center. John’s history of success in engineering and his commitment to the Knoxville area, as well as his role as mentor and investor puts him at the cutting edge of helping the startups that are associated with the center and his two primary programs to ensure its success.
John Bruck: I am drawn to tech-based companies that are in their earliest stages. And there are really what has grown to be a hub of technological innovation and entrepreneurship here in Knoxville. I think one of the popular business journals has ranked Knoxville as the 16th largest innovation hub in the country, and that’s because of programs that have grown out of the University of Tennessee, that have grown out of Oak Ridge National Lab.
Rickey McCallum: An integral part of the local technology community, there are a handful of programs across the region in different organizations that have contributed assistance to help foster these young startups. One notable program is the Innovation Crossroads, housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and most recently Techstars, which is a co-sponsored program between ORNL, TVA, and the University of Tennessee, all of which are working in collaboration with the Spark Innovation Center to create the ideal environment for tech startups to grow and hopefully call East Tennessee home.
John Bruck: Along with the Innovation Crossroads program, and particularly at UT and now the Research Park, we are positioned to really be a focus for early-stage tech-based companies and that’s specifically what has drawn me here, this particular region—specifically Knoxville region—along with the many sources of high intellect and innovation. The challenge that it faces is one of being able to provide the space that’s required by tech startups—and by that, I mean laboratory space—and tech-based mentorship and access to tech-oriented capital. But what we saw was the need for those things to match against companies that were growing out of the University of Tennessee and graduating from the University of Tennessee, companies that were graduating from the Innovation Crossroads program, and being able to place those companies into space that met their needs, was affordable, that was readily available, and could provide them with the other kinds of support that they needed to make the company successful. So, if they need programming, for example, a series of workshops on leadership or financial modeling or customer discovery, we’re equipped to help those companies, along with providing them with physical space that matches their needs. So, what I think Spark did that is turning out to be quite successful is matching what we offer with what our customers really require, which truly is even less than that we teach to our startups themselves. So, the Spark Innovation Center is an early-stage organization, and it has begun to really meet those needs.
Rickey McCallum: Within the Innovation Center, there are two major programs that help early startups get the assistance that they need to flourish in their respective areas of expertise. The first is the Spark Innovation Center, and the second is the Spark Cleantech Accelerator. Both programs bring specifically crafted support for cleantech startup companies in various stages of growth. Let’s look at the Spark Innovation Center, Spark’s flagship program.
This incubator is meaningfully crafted for early tech startup companies who must identify a clear need in cleantech marketplace and are producing a product that demonstrates a solid product-market fit. Companies in the program often build a working prototype before engaging with initial customers, of which there are some pretty interesting ones, to say the least. The incubator is designed to allow these companies the room to scale, both in terms of product and in capital. While this program serves as a catalyst for helping these young companies, at the end of the day, it’s the companies themselves who need to strive for excellence. For John, those companies need to demonstrate certain strengths and attributes.
John Bruck: The programs need to be collaborative. In fact, I like the mantra, “Collaborate first.” And we do. So, the three technical hubs which are Innovation Crossroads is the oldest, Techstars, and the Spark Innovation Center. The directors of those organizations are actually very close, they know each other, and we collaborate on things like how to increase our number of applications and the quality of our applications.
Rickey McCallum: With an emphasis on collaboration at the forefront, John fills us in on what companies can expect once they get accepted into the program.
John Bruck: Typical laboratory requirements are made available that aren’t really available in any other spaces. First and foremost, there is wet lab space, there is fume hood availability, there are higher than normal power resources that are available, there are gases that can be made available, benchtops, sinks, and DI water sources, all that stuff’s available. We’re sitting in one of the most sophisticated research labs, probably, in the world. So, that’s tremendous to have. In addition, there is day-to-day mentoring and there is periodic programming that falls into the workshops that I mentioned before.
Probably the most valuable resource that we provide are connections. And by connections I mean, we can strike up conversations, develop relationships with our strategic partners. So, we have tax experts, we have audit experts, we have energy experts. One of our primary supporters is TVA. We have experts that are in all sorts of supportive supply chain kinds of roles for our companies. We’ve got quantum computing simulation, and we have pharmaceutical molecular programming, and just, you name it and the connections are possible for us to make and to help the companies out. And then ultimately, we want to connect with customers and we want to connect with investors. So, those connections I think broadly are the biggest resource that we can offer.
Rickey McCallum: With all of the support that the Spark Innovation Center provides, it is crucial to see that companies in this program scale, strive, and succeed. Of the current lineup of companies housed in Spark, there are two that are notable. The startups are exemplary cases for the reason, Spark exists to begin with: they identified an area in cleantech where progressive leaps and bounds needed to be made. The result is some of the most exciting work to come out of the Spark Innovation Center so far.
I recently caught up with Dr. Anna Douglas, the CEO and co-founder of SkyNano, whose potential contributions to the future of cleantech are limitless in vision. SkyNano made headlines recently with some very exciting news. Anna and her team were named as a finalist in Elon Musk’s 100-million dollar XPRIZE carbon removal. Naturally, the work that Dr. Anna Douglas is doing is certainly pushing the cleantech envelope.
Dr. Anna Douglas: My name is Anna Douglas. I serve as the co-founder and CEO of SkyNano. SkyNano was really born out of my PhD research at Vanderbilt. So, I went to Vanderbilt to pursue a degree in material science. I primarily studied battery technology as an early graduate student, and I just kept coming across the challenge that the way we synthesize and mine battery materials today is not very sustainable. It puts a huge upfront carbon burden on a battery to last for a very long time in order to actually get the benefits of batteries being clean energy technologies.
And so, we started to think about how can we better make materials that go into batteries? Carbon is used in every kind of battery and every kind of next-gen beyond lithium-ion batteries. And so, we started to look at how else can we make carbon structures that are important for these technologies? That’s really kind of where the ethos of SkyNano’s core technology came from. Once we started to realize, hey, we could make a business case out of this, that’s really where that project evolved from just a science project and part of my dissertation into a startup company.
Rickey McCallum: When we asked Dr. Douglas about why she chose to apply to the incubator program, her response spoke volumes to the benefits of working at the exceptional facilities at the UT Research Park.
Dr. Anna Douglas: So, I think one thing that’s unique to hardware-based startups is the need for specialized space. When you’re talking about a software startup or an app, you can do that from basically anywhere, you know, laptop, couch, in someone’s basement, you got a company. That’s not the same for hardware startups, we need very specialized space, we need lab equipment, we need very specialized utilities, waste disposal, things like this. And you can’t find that everywhere.
And so, for us, really space was the biggest thing we were looking for as we exited the Innovation Crossroads program, you know, looking for a residency program, essentially. And Spark is the only program around that offers that, and there’s very few programs like Spark really across the country where space is a part of being a part of the program. The added benefit, of course, is the community and the mentorship that you get alongside of that, but I think the real asset that we were really looking for was space. And this is a pretty second-to-none space you could be in.
Rickey McCallum: A second-to-none space. This is exactly the kind of support that Spark wishes to provide to its startups. We asked Dr. Douglas what exactly second-to-none encompassed and what attracted her to the facilities that Spark Innovation Center could provide.
Dr. Anna Douglas: Yeah, so we currently rent, we share a lab with Eonix, which is another local Knoxville company. And so together, we lease about 600 square feet. So, SkyNano is 300, Eonix is 300. The really unique capacity of that space is—so SkyNano has a fume hood in that space, so we can do work with chemicals that require ventilation.
We have great electrical power. SkyNano is now looking for more electrical power, but for now, this has been really amazing electric capacity. Waste handling and disposal—EHS—comes once a week to come pick up chemical waste, just general good lab ventilation. So, the lab air is replaced six times an hour with fresh air from the exterior. It’s basically like working outside without any of the elements.
And so, for us, those things are really important and you can’t find them anywhere. So, that has been really where Spark has been amazing. Of course, then there’s the added benefit of being right on the river, having access to all the walking trails, being close to downtown and all the amenities here. For us, it’s been a great recruitment tool [laugh] as we show people where we’re located. We’ve brought on more people since we moved to Spark, and I do think our location has been a factor in that.
Rickey McCallum: SkyNano was the perfect fit for the Spark incubator, and with a focus on decarbonization, SkyNano is unprecedented in its timing and application. But it begs to question, what exactly is decarbonization? And how is SkyNano making that happen? Dr. Douglas explains.
Dr. Anna Douglas: [electrification 00:15:22], decarbonization, making materials for batteries. I would say, you know, in terms of decarbonization, one thing that has been really tough in industry is finding solutions that can deal with a wide variety of CO2 sources, right? Anything from really high purity carbon dioxide to more industrial sources like what comes out of, you know, a natural gas power plant, which is only, like, four-and-a-half percent by volume CO2, all the way to direct air capture, which is 412 ppm or so.
One of the really cool things that SkyNano is doing is we’re actually able to address pretty much the whole spectrum of CO2 sources. And so, we can really work with essentially any kind of industrial client or customer who wants to decarbonize their operations, provide a solution for them to get to net-zero on their chemical emissions, but with that, actually make a valuable product. So, it’s an overall profitable operation, it kind of helps everyone. And this is a way that a free market solution can win because there’s such demand for the end products and there’s demand for people who can offtake different types of CO2.
Rickey McCallum: The complexity and technical detail of decarbonization are well beyond the reach of what we can offer here, but at the end of the day, it is a technology that can take significant measures to decrease carbon emissions across our society. With the climate crisis—an ever-looming threat and reality—it becomes more crucial with every passing day. But SkyNano is still a company and that company needs to sell a product. So, who exactly is their target customer, and what are they trying to sell?
Dr. Anna Douglas: So, we have a solution that is really important to two different types of people. On the CO2 emitter side, right, a lot of, particularly, energy production is trying to move towards a decarbonized economy. So, onboarding things like renewables, nuclear, things like that, to replace our existing coal and natural gas infrastructure. One of the challenges with that, though, is the intermittency, right?
And so, the sun’s not always shining, the wind’s not always blowing, and we don’t have enough nuclear sites licensed to just move to nuclear. And so, if we were to onboard pretty much all renewables, that would make the everyday consumer’s electric bill just skyrocket. So, when we think about the transition towards a cleaner energy economy, carbon capture and utilization is a very important piece of that because we’re actually able to partner with a local utility and decarbonize their operations without the everyday consumer’s energy bill going up. Energy pricing influences everything from heating and cooling your house to the cost of your food to the cost of goods, all of it. And so, that’s a really important piece.
The other way that we really can touch the everyday consumer is just through your materials and devices performing better. So, the materials that we’re making, carbon nanotubes, they really should be used in all kinds of things, in your batteries and your tires, in your coatings. If anyone’s ever sat on a tarmac waiting for their plane to be de-iced, it’s a nightmare. Just a tiny coating of carbon nanotubes on the exterior of planes could de-ice planes in a matter of minutes. The reason that they’re not is because of their price today; they’re just way too expensive.
So, SkyNano’s solution really is a way to make these materials at a much lower cost in a way that decarbonizes heavy industry and provides just better technology solutions to everyday consumers.
Rickey McCallum: Dr. Douglas and SkyNano’s work is but one of many companies housed in the Innovation Center. Another rising success in the incubator program is Eonix. We were joined by its co-founder and CEO Don DeRosa, who spoke to us about how Eonix is changing the game when it comes to the future of battery technologies. Their focus is to make them safe, more stable, and usable across a wide spectrum of markets. Don fills us in on how, as a graduate student, he had a small side hustle that ended up serving as his ignition for his entrepreneurial spirit.
Don DeRosa: When my adviser found out, he was actually shocked because he was very entrepreneurial himself as well. So, he thought I was, kind of, a pure-play scientist and when he discovered this, he was like, “You should start using these talents for something else.” So, he gave us an opportunity to commercialize some molecules out of the university that showed a lot of merit for energy storage at the time. He showed us the initial steps to building a hard tech company, and that was fantastic. I don’t think we would have been able to do it without him.
You don’t go from repairing water-damaged iPhones in a one-bedroom graduate school apartment to an electrolyte company right out of the gate. But yeah. So, that was the initial inception. So, around 2013 to 2014, we founded the company.
Rickey McCallum: Don has to keep the company secrets close to his chest, so he could not provide us with a technical deep-dive into what exactly he does. But ultimately, Eonix has one major objective.
Don DeRosa: We look to commercialize two molecules. We received about a half-a-million dollars in grant funding right out of the gate. And although the two molecules showed a lot of merit in the lab, it took quite some time to figure out how they perform in commercial devices. And that’s really the first pivot for our company where we decided that the real problem when it comes to developing materials for energy storage devices, such as lithium-ion batteries, it’s not the material you don’t have—it’s not the absence of some novel, super-crazy compound—it’s the fact that it takes years and typically millions of dollars to determine if it’s even worthwhile. So, our goal at that time was to develop a technology that could reduce the time and cost it took to comprehensively evaluate a material for new batteries.
We eventually were accepted into the Innovation Crossroads program at Oak Ridge National Lab, and we were able to build out this system. And then somebody at the lab was like, “You have this phenomenal system for evaluating materials. Why aren’t you using them for lithium [laugh] ion batteries? That’s a massive market.” And he was completely right. So, that was the second major pivot. First, it was determining that we really needed a quicker, cheaper way to look at materials, and then we should have focused on a much larger market.
Rickey McCallum: With their initial project gaining momentum, Don and Eonix needed to tap into the next stage, they needed scale, and they found the right place to do so.
Don DeRosa: That eventually brought us to the Spark Innovation Center at the conclusion of Innovation Crossroads program where we were able to take that system, scale it up, deploy it towards discovering materials for lithium-ion batteries. And honestly, once we came into Spark, we got funding from the US Army, we were able to develop a nonflammable lithium-ion battery electrolyte within four months. So, it’s a very quick process. We’re currently going through the commercialization and scale process with it. And yeah, that’s where we’re at today.
Rickey McCallum: The business of Eonix aside, Don and his team also needed to find some more practical support that Spark provides.
Don DeRosa: To fabricate a battery, you need a lot of materials that aren’t necessarily very safe, independently of being packaged in a battery. And they present a lot of environmental health and safety complications. So, out of the gate, you need a facility that recognizes that level of safety is necessary and then has the infrastructure available to account for handling those materials, bringing them in safely. Safety is the most important part when it comes to handling these kinds of materials. And the Spark Innovation Center located at this facility has all of the infrastructure necessary so that we can safely experiment with new materials, we can build batteries here in an environment where we don’t have to be concerned with faulty [laugh] infrastructure or endangering anybody.
So, that’s the first issue. So, Spark Innovation Center, we came in, we were up and running within a month. It was a very smooth process. Smoother than we’ve had in a traditional academic environment or in a government lab before. So, it was very startup-friendly.
Rickey McCallum: With all those needs met, Eonix began to work on their primary focus, which was on making lithium-ion batteries more stable and safe.
Don DeRosa: With our system, our screening system that we developed, we were able to in a phase one project, develop materials that were nonflammable substitutes in four months. So, it’s like, essentially the Diet Coke of lithium-ion batteries. It’s the nonflammable lithium-ion battery. Same exact device—looks the same, manufactured the same—but it just doesn’t have any of the flammability in it. And that’s a market-specific application. That’s just for the defense industry.
There are going to be different applications that we’re going to target from a materials perspective. So, we’re going to rapidly design materials for electric vehicles where you have different concerns than the battery in your cell phone or the battery that might be in your Apple Watch. They’re all lithium-ion batteries, but they have different needs and as a result, different materials would perform better. Just takes a really long time to find them. And we’re trying to shrink that process.
Rickey McCallum: Another core objective for the Spark Innovation Center, especially when it comes to fostering these young entrepreneurs, is to create a gateway to collaboration. Ultimately, we want to extend this beyond the Research Park and university as well as the greater Knoxville area and across the state of Tennessee. Don offers up an excellent take on how this is happening.
Don DeRosa: This is actually a great win-win opportunity for our company and the university. We’re looking for talent all the time, and the university is looking for workforce training opportunities and giving their students the best possible education for them to either work at a company like ours or work in that field. Now, what’s fantastic is we’re in the lithium-ion battery space and this market is starving for people to jump into this career in terms of research, manufacturing, all this stuff. And we’re looking to hire as well. So, we’re able to offer UTK students internships where they can help learn about what’s going on at our company, we can get a feel for the roles that we want to explore in the future as well because we’re a growing company and we’re trying to figure out what direction to grow in.
And that’s really a win-win opportunity. There’s poised to be thousands of manufacturing lithium-ion battery jobs, so that gives them insight to how a battery is fabricated, what materials go in there, what are the safety precautions associated with fabrication, and just gives them a huge leg up in terms of going out and pursuing these careers and landing great jobs. So, in either outcome, we get a great individual to work with us, the university has a great employment track record and graduates a student that’s very capable to go out in the job market. And then there’s the whole R&D phase where evaluating new materials for lithium-ion batteries is a very big publication space right now. So, any university professor that has a new material, we’re able to quickly evaluate it, so something that might take them a few months, maybe even a year, we’re able to do in a few weeks.
Rickey McCallum: The focus on collaboration is shared by Dr. Douglas as well. Much like Eonix, SkyNano is another excellent relationship to foster for both the Research Park and the local community. Dr. Douglas has already interacted with UT students and she shares her own hopes for the role that collaboration can play.
Dr. Anna Douglas: Yeah, absolutely. And I think if I had been exposed to entrepreneurship as a potential career path earlier, perhaps it would have been a bit of an easier transition. And so, I think as a student, that would be a really cool opportunity.
So, SkyNano has collaborated a little bit with the university. We’ve helped support proposals, we’ve been a subcontractor on some proposals with different faculty across campus, including some in [unintelligible 00:27:15], some outside of [unintelligible 00:27:16]. You know, for us, we can provide a solution in a variety of ways. We have electrochemistry experts on staff, just due to our technology, but certainly, we’re also making materials, so we’ve actually provided carbon nanotube samples that we’ve made in the lab to a professor on campus to use in an application that we would never have thought of on our own. We’ve had students come by and look at the lab and help get inspired to think about entrepreneurship as a potential career path. And for us, that’s just been a really exciting opportunity because it’s not something you get in just a general commercial space.
Rickey McCallum: The Research Park and Spark Innovation Center are postured to serve as pillars within the local community, to act as that gateway for collaboration. Following the example of SkyNano and Eonix, there are untold opportunities in the future of other companies to collaborate, contribute, and to become local figures. So, the question is, what’s next for our innovators and entrepreneurs? Where do their hopes lie for the future of their companies?
Dr. Anna Douglas: On the five-year horizon, we would be looking at actually installing SkyNano plants co-located with heavy-emitting industries—so whether that’s energy industry, chemical production, et cetera—and actually serving a pretty significant market with the carbon materials that we’re making. On the ten-year horizon, I would imagine every carbon additive material that goes into your tire, your battery, your paints, coatings, whatever is made from carbon dioxide.
Don DeRosa: What we do from the materials perspective is we look at what a real pain point is for the application that we’re targeting. In the instance of the defense industry, the most paramount thing that they’re concerned with is mitigating risk and safety in their system. It’s a huge liability to have a lithium-ion battery in a lot of the environments that they work in. I think that’s a very compelling market. And it not only offers peace of mind for people installing large grid storage battery systems that would help manage, let’s say, wind or solar, but there’s definitely an element of cost reduction there as well.
So, there’s potentially a 20 to 25% CapEx savings out of the gate that you could get on the commercial side for grid storage. And if anybody thinks of anything else, they could feel free to email me. We are always looking places to sell stuff.
Rickey McCallum: Let’s turn back to John, the director of the Spark Innovation Center. With the great potential of companies like SkyNano and Eonix, John is enthusiastic about the cleantech initiatives that are coming out of the Spark and its incubator and accelerator programs.
John Bruck: Those are two programs that work pretty well together and they’re very different. One is a two-year program, one is a 12-week program. The longer-term vision I think is that we are able to support, contribute to the advanced energy and high tech business community in the region and in the state. If you look, for example, at the global advanced energy market of $1.4 trillion, the state of Tennessee contributes percentage-level component to that global market.
So, we’re in the 45 to $50 billion a year range. That’s huge. The state of Tennessee has 400,000 employees in the advanced energy space, 20,000 companies. So, when you look at the big picture economy in this space, I think what the dream for the Spark Innovation Center is to work to help the earliest stage companies grow to eventually enter into that space, financially sustainable, and from a business standpoint, very competitive.
Rickey McCallum: The stories of Eonix and SkyNano are only the beginning. The Spark Innovation Center is positioned to become a leader in cleantech and an integral part of the Research Park future. Here’s the Research Park CEO Tom Rogers again with some thoughts about the role of the Innovation Center.
Tom Rogers: The university is a Research 1 university and they’ve picked up on this momentum in the entrepreneurial world as well. So, the college of business has an Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. The College of Engineering teaches entrepreneurial courses. The College of Law has a business clinic that teaches law students how to work with startup companies. The UT Research Foundation hires interns that help them look at intellectual property and decide what to pursue in terms of patenting.
There’s entrepreneurial activity all over this campus. And what we’ve done collectively—not the Spark Innovation Center so much as the entire region, whether they’re part of the university or not—become part of the community and succeed here in Knoxville.
Rickey McCallum: The possibilities for what is to come for the Spark Innovation Center and its programs and the future of cleantech are exciting to say the least. The Research Park in collaboration with its member organizations are working hard to stand above the crowd as examples of progressive entrepreneurial spirit. This is a story that is just in its beginnings and the best is still, without a doubt, yet to come. Thank you for joining our brief look into the exciting work being done within the UT Research Park and the Spark Innovation Center. The Research Park, with its history rooted in agriculture and the rise of the fundamental ideas of the Park to the advancements being made within its walls, the atmosphere around the Research Park is only becoming more electric.
In our next episode, we’ll turn our attention to the Institute for Advanced Materials and Manufacturing, where some incredible work is being done in the world of material sciences. Check out the next episode for an extensive and exciting look at the mind-boggling science being done there.
Rickey McCallum: Thank you for listening to The Research Park Chronicles with Rickey McCallum. Keep up with the latest episodes by subscribing on Apple or Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever fine podcasts are found.