Earlier this year, Ofer Nemirovsky (EE’79, W’79), a managing director of HarbourVest Partners, LLC, a global private equity firm in Boston, donated $500,000 to the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Health-Tech program to establish the Nemirovsky Engineering and Medicine Opportunity (NEMO) Prize. The goal of the prize is to encourage collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Engineering and Applied Science by supporting early-stage innovative ideas at the intersection of engineering and medicine that might not receive funding from traditional sources. 

The first recipient of this term prize, which includes an award of $80,000, is César de la Fuente, Presidential Assistant Professor in the departments of psychiatry, microbiology, and bioengineering. He proposed a paper-based COVID diagnostic system that could capture viral particles on a person’s breath, then give a result in a matter of seconds when taken to a testing site.

READ MORE