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The solution was a natural find for Emily Kennedy. As a University of Akron biomimicry fellow — using nature to solve real-world problems — working at Gojo Industries, Kennedy rose to the challenge to help the company reduce the energy consumption of its hand sanitizer dispensers.
Kennedy and a team went through biomimicry and traditional innovation processes and looked at several biological models before finding the answer. The design that reduced energy consumption by 50 percent was based on the principles of how the human heart moves blood through the cardiovascular system. Kennedy scored two patents for her work, and it’s slated to be a part of Gojo’s new touchless dispensers at some point.
The University of Akron formed the Biomimicry Research Innovation Center in 2015 to help find results like this. In a partnership with Great Lakes Biomimicry, the center pools resources to look to nature for solutions to problems in settings ranging from academic to corporate. The center creates unified collaboration between departments on campus that have previously done this work separately.
“[This] helps to synthesize it into something that would be greater than 20 labs across campus working independently on things that are all biologically inspired,” says Peter Niewiarowski, one of the center’s principal investigators who also researches gecko-inspired adhesives.
Local institutions work with the center to sponsor 12 biomimicry fellows who work in the company’s research and development departments for five years. In 2017, three fellows graduated with Ph.D. training in biomimicry, becoming the first in the world to graduate from this sort of program.
The fellowships have a stipend, so they replace the typical graduate assistantship model by embedding the fellows in companies 20 hours a week to gain corporate experience, and some fellows do research that overlaps with their Ph.D. requirements. The key is that the fellows teach these companies how to apply biomimicry to their processes.
“They are learning how to connect their expertise to a broader range of problems and issues — and also to work with others that don’t necessarily understand or come from their own discipline,” Niewiarowski says. “When they leave, they leave behind some expertise that stays with the company.”
But a corporate setting can also teach fellows the industrial side of developing their findings.
“They’re thinking about markets, they’re thinking about design, they’re thinking about sustainability,” Niewiarowski says.
Akron leads this emerging field, with Niewiarowski estimating that about a half-dozen other universities have biomimicry programs. And that innovation is expanding. At the end of the 2018-19 school year, the center plans to announce the addition of its undergraduate certificate in biomimicry that will train students across disciplines in four main areas: engineering, design, biology and business. The center is also planning to expand its reach by offering its experts as consultants to companies on a short-term basis to provide services around technical research and biomimicry.
“What we’re trying to do is connect research to the broader world,” Niewiarowski says. “We’re trying to get across the boundary that separates universities from other organizations in our communities.”
