Peter Rakich, Donna L. Dubinsky Professor of Applied Physics and physics, along with Greg Luther, PhD, CEO and co-Founder of Resonance Micro Technologies Inc., has received one of ten awards from the Roberts Innovation Fund, which will help support his research.
The Roberts Innovation Fund, an accelerator fund created in 2022, managed by Yale Ventures and overseen by Yale Engineering’s Office of the Dean, focuses on supporting technologies with significant potential to benefit a wide-ranging number of fields. In addition to funding, awardees receive world-class support and mentorship with access to industry experts and more than $1.8M in cloud computing credits and other resources from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. The awardees will present their breakthrough projects for the first time at the Yale Innovation Summit on May 28, 2025.
In line with Yale Engineering’s strategic vision, the Roberts Innovation Fund bolsters the School’s culture of innovation and entrepreneurship by advancing an ecosystem that brings to market discoveries that will benefit humanity. Yale Engineering Dean Jeffrey Brock noted that the significant number of outstanding proposals this year underscores both the broad range of technologies the Roberts Innovation Fund can support and the strong and growing interest from Yale Engineering faculty in these opportunities. This year applicants hailed from nearly all Yale Engineering departments, including computer science, biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, materials science, applied physics, electrical and computer engineering, and chemical and environmental engineering.
“The Roberts Innovation Fund showcases Yale Engineering’s commitment to addressing global challenges through innovation, and the diversity of this year’s winning projects – from energy-efficient AI to new seawater carbon-capture techniques – reflects the vast range of those challenges,” said Yale Engineering Dean Jeffrey Brock. “With awardees from nearly every engineering department, we’re seeing our strategic vision in action. To make a real-world impact, these groundbreaking faculty projects must make the leap from laboratory research to market-ready technologies, and the Roberts Fund helps to bridge that gap.”
The Roberts Fund continues to evolve in its third year, broadening its scope to address a wider range of technological challenges while strengthening connections between academic innovation and industry applications.
“This year, we were once again reminded of the potential that Yale Engineering projects have to impact some of the world’s most pressing challenges,” said the Fund’s director, Claudia Reuter. “It’s a privilege to be able to support teams working on initiatives ranging from advances in AI to water quality issues.”
The Roberts Innovation Fund is open to Yale faculty with a primary or secondary appointment in the School of Engineering & Applied Science with a novel innovation that solves a significant problem with the potential for scale. Applicants must demonstrate a proof of concept and a clear articulation for the use of the awarded funds.
One of the awardees, Rex Ying, assistant professor of computer science, said he’s looking forward to working with the Roberts Fund on his project, with Yale researcher Ali Maatouk, to develop an automated domain-expert LLM for any domain.
“The Roberts Innovation Fund provides exactly the kind of support we need to bridge the gap between academic research and real-world deployment for our specialized LLM technology,” Ying said. “With this funding, we aim to democratize access to domain-specific AI expertise, enabling users to create custom AI assistants tailored to specialized fields from medicine to engineering with just a simple request. The mentorship and resources that come with the Roberts award will be invaluable as we work to bring this technology to market and help organizations leverage the power of specialized AI without requiring deep technical expertise.”
Compact ultra-high stability vacuum-gap reference cavities enabling portable precision metrology and sensing
- Peter Rakich, Donna L. Dubinsky Professor of Applied Physics & Physics
- Greg Luther, PhD, CEO and co-Founder of Resonance Micro Technologies Inc.
A wide range of technologies, including navigation (e.g. GPS), radar, sensing, and communications technologies rely on low-noise oscillators (i.e. clocks). The lower the noise of the oscillator, the more accurately users can identify the position of a vehicle, detect a microwave communications signal, or sense motion in a radar system. The Rakich Lab has invented first-of-a-kind ultra-high performance micro-resonators and oscillators that fill critical technology gaps in both classical and quantum application spaces.