Materials science and engineering doctoral student Pritha Sarkar has been named a recipient of the Postdoctoral Innovation Fellow Award, awarded through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Accelerating Research Translation (ART) grant.
Sarkar is one of three students who were selected for the UCF award out of a pool of more than 100 applicants. She is the only recipient from the College of Engineering and Computer Science.
“It’s exciting and such an honor,” Sarkar says. “There was a very talented cohort, so I think it really brought out the best in all of us. I’m grateful to UCF for this amazing opportunity.”
As a Postdoctoral Innovation Fellow, Sarkar will work closely with the UCF Office of Technology Transfer to learn more about entrepreneurship and commercialization. She and the other two recipients already completed extensive training that taught them about the I-CORPS program as well as how to create a business model, how to draft value propositions and how to listen to customers’ needs.
“The training was intense but productive,” Sarkar says. “We had regular meetings with our instructors and mentors, attended workshops, did customer discovery and so much more. These really pushed us to think out of the box and out of our comfort zone.”
Sarkar said she was inspired to pursue this fellowship because of the mindset that her advisor, Associate Professor Kausik Mukhopadhyay, instilled in her.
“Doing research that can eventually evolve into something that people can use has always been the goal for me,” Sarkar says. “My advisor, Dr. K, also played a big role in training us that way – to think about scalability and translation. I believe that taking my work from the lab to the bench is necessary for making our technology accessible so that it can actually help the people that need it.”
In 2025, Sarkar and Mukhopadhyay gained media attention for their work on a sponge-like bandage that can stop severe bleeding. A patent has been filed for the product, called SilFoam, and the team is looking for licensing and research collaborators. She says their goal is to get SilFoam on shelves and into the hands of medical professionals and first responders.
“Learning how to have an entrepreneurial mindset has definitely been valuable and necessary for what we wish to achieve,” Sarkar says. “I hope to learn more about how to make translation successful – identify the customers who need our technology, the scalability hurdles and how we can overcome them, the sales and marketing, the finances – there is so much to learn. This is only the beginning.”
- Written by Marisa Ramiccio