{"id":26066,"date":"2018-10-24T19:46:55","date_gmt":"2018-10-24T19:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/d45h139.public.uconn.edu\/sites\/news\/?p=26066"},"modified":"2024-09-10T14:52:23","modified_gmt":"2024-09-10T18:52:23","slug":"male-fertility-test-developers-win-venture-competition-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2018\/10\/male-fertility-test-developers-win-venture-competition-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Male Fertility Test Developers Win Venture Competition"},"content":{"rendered":" Engineering doctoral student Reza Amin presents the QRFertile concept to a panel of judges during the Wolff New Venture Competition. (Eric Olson for UConn)\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>By: Mike Enright, UConn Communications<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>One grew up in the shadow of UConn and the other, on a distant continent. But Stephanie Knowlton and Reza Amin are happy they made their trip to the state\u2019s flagship university \u2013 no matter the route.<\/p>\n<p>The pair of biomedical engineering doctoral candidates recently won\u00a0$20,000 to further their entrepreneurial concept through the <a href=\"https:\/\/ccei.uconn.edu\/wolff-new-venture-competition\/\">Wolff New Venture Competition<\/a>. They are developing an in-home device to measure male fertility, called QRfertile, under the guidance of\u00a0Savas Tasoglu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen we are in the lab every day, it feels like a lab project,\u201d says Knowlton. \u201cBut when we get out there and talk to people about the potential to be something that affects real people, that gets us more excited.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Wolff Prize is endowed through the Thomas John and Bette Wolff Family Chair in Strategic Entrepreneurship, and the event is sponsored by the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in UConn\u2019s School of Business.<\/p>\n<p>Amin came to Connecticut after doing his undergraduate work in electronics in India and his master\u2019s in mechanical engineering in his native country of Iran. He is earning his doctoral degree at UConn in biomedical engineering. Knowlton, of Tolland, grew up with some members of the Wolff family as neighbors \u2013 something she didn\u2019t even realize until the day of the competition.<\/p>\n<p>Amin and Knowlton began working on this project in 2015, when it was just a research idea.\u00a0One in six couples of reproductive age worldwide are affected at least once by some form of infertility, and male infertility contributes to about half of those cases, according to Tasoglu.<\/p>\n<p>The pair developed the technology needed for the home testing before they had the idea of what the exact product would be. They then started to explore how consumers use microfluidics \u2013 the science of manipulating and controlling fluids on a small sub-millimeter scale.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2018\/10\/male-fertility-test-developers-win-venture-competition\/\">Read more on UConn Today.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Through the Wolff New Venture Competition, a pair of biomedical engineering doctoral candidates won $20,000 to further develop an in-home device to measure male fertility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":218492,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1866],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[43],"class_list":["post-26066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-engr"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-16 11:11:00","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26066"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218496,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26066\/revisions\/218496"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/218492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26066"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=26066"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=26066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}