Special thanks to this year’s judges!
John Calvert, United States Patent and Trademark Office
John Calvert is Senior Advisor in the Office of Innovation Development at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. John’s responsibilities include overseeing inventor, small business, and university outreach initiatives. Following passage of the America Invents Act (AIA), the USPTO made outreach and education a high priority due to the increased interest in intellectual property from the business and academic communities. John is also the administrator for the Inventors Assistance Program. As administrator, he has helped create inventor assistance through pro bono and pro se initiatives both inside the USPTO and through working with universities and bar organizations. John holds a Master of Science Degree in Textile Management from North Carolina State University and began his tenure at the USPTO as an examiner specializing in textile technology. John received the Department of Commerce Bronze Medal for Superior Federal Service and the USPTO Exceptional Career Award. John completed Syracuse University’s Maxwell School certificate program in advanced public management as well as the Executive Development Seminar sponsored by the Office of Personnel Management.
Joe Palca, National Public Radio
Joe Palca is a science correspondent for NPR. Since joining NPR in 1992, Joe has covered a range of science topics – everything from biomedical research to astronomy. Joe began his journalism career in television in 1982, working as a health producer for the CBS affiliate in Washington, DC. In 1986, he left television for a seven-year stint as a print journalist, first as the Washington news editor for Nature, and then as a senior correspondent for Science Magazine. Joe has won numerous awards, including the National Academies Communications Award, the Science-in-Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers, the American Chemical Society James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Prize, and the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Writing. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz where he worked on human sleep physiology. With Flora Lichtman, Joe is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).
Ben Schrag, National Science Foundation
Ben Schrag joined the National Science Foundation in 2009 as a Program Director in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, with responsibility in the areas of advanced materials and nanotechnology. Prior to this, he served for four years as Director of Research and Development at Micro Magnetics, where he led a development effort to commercialize a new family of high-performance magnetic microsensor products for demanding consumer and military applications. Before this, he served as manager of the metrology group at Micro Magnetics, and also as a visiting scientist at Brown University. He has served as the principal investigator on a number of federal awards, including NSF Phase I and Phase II SBIR projects and an Advanced Technology Program award from NIST. He received his PhD in Physics from Brown University, with a specialization in materials.