MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (06/13/2024)— Professor Jian-Ping Wang, who has founded four start-up companies while at the University of Minnesota, was honored with the “Faculty Innovator of the Year” award at the 2025 University of Minnesota Founder’s Day.

Wang, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor who also holds the Robert F. Hartmann Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is a world-renowned researcher in novel magnetic materials and spintronic devices for information storage, memory and computing, and biomedical sensing.

He has co-founded four startup companies—Niron Magnetics Inc., Zepto Life Technology LLC, Magtection, and Universal Magnetic Systems LLC. Wang’s invention of the rare-earth-free and environment-friendly iron nitride permanent magnet was named one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023 and led to Minnesota-based startup company Niron Magnetics, which plans to open a manufacturing facility in Sartell, Minn. Niron’s magnets offer a sustainable solution to the increasing demand for permanent magnets while also providing domestic supply chain security.

Wang’s research consists of many firsts in the field. Wang’s pioneering experimental demonstration on the exchange coupled composite (ECC) media has been used in hard disk drive (HDD) technology since 2008.

Wang is the inventor of novel magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) structures and spin-orbit torque (SOT) materials and devices, both of which have been deployed and are being actively explored for magnetic memory and spintronic computing applications. In addition, he is the inventor of Computational Random Access Memory (CRAM) for computing using memory cells, which has been validated through benchmarking efforts to address energy-efficient memory-centric computing for artificial intelligent (AI) applications.

Omni Agrobot developed by robotics master’s students Abhishek Chaudhari and David Aviles Hinostroza, and Swapnil Puranik won the Best Overall Award at the event. 

Vivarent by computer science Ph.D. student Lalitaditya Divakarla and computer science master’s student Nicole Vu won the Audience Favorite Award. 

Other College of Science and Engineering student and faculty projects that were featured at the event included:

The 13th annual Founder’s Day was co-hosted by the Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship in the Carlson School of Management and the University of Minnesota Libraries.