Inside Rensselaer, October 8, 2010: Smart Lighting ERC Kicks Off Industrial Speaker Series



	Annette Finsterbusch

Smart Lighting ERC Kicks Off Industrial Speaker Series

The Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center (ERC) Industrial Speaker Series at Rensselaer is a seminar series that aims to present an industry perspective on smart lighting technologies and markets. In addition, in line with the ERC mission to teach students about life in industry, each speaker will share their personal story of how they came into industry and how their career path has influenced their life.

The events are open to all Rensselaer faculty and students. In addition, presentations will be made available live via Adobe Connect to the core partner institutions Boston University and the University of New Mexico, outreach partner schools Howard University, Morgan State University, and Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, as well as to the industrial members.

The opening of the series took place on Sept. 15. Annette Finsterbusch, founder of Applied Ventures, the investing arm of industrial member Applied Materials, talked about “Investing in Solid-State Lighting: the Past, the Present, and the Future.” In front of a standing-room-only audience, Finsterbusch discussed the investment landscape of the lighting industry, focusing on the recent past and present opportunities. She also discussed how today’s early stage technology development fuels the future investment opportunity pipeline, and the key aspects of successful start-up companies that investors are looking for. The seminar ended in a lively questions-and-answers session with members of the audience.

Graduate student Kayvan Rafiee from the Mechanical Engineering Department said, “This was such a wonderful event and one of the best talks at RPI I have ever been to!”

The next lectures in the series are presentations by industrial advisory board member Matt Stough, director of solid-state research at Osram-Sylvania, who will give a talk titled “Thinking Differently about LED Lighting” on Wednesday, Oct. 13, in JEC 3117; and scientific advisory board member Kevin Dowling, vice president of research and development at MC10, on Nov. 17.

For more details, contact Silvia Mioc at miocs@rpi.edu or 276-4010, or visit http://smartlighting.rpi.edu.

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Inside Rensselaer, Strategic Communications and External Relations
1000 Troy Building, 110 Eighth Street, Troy, N.Y. 12180 or to leibat@rpi.edu.

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