2006 Faculty Awards: MeasureNet Earns Honor for Sprague, Vorhees

Chemistry labs around the country are benefitting from the innovations of Estel Sprague and Robert Vorhees of UC's Chemistry Department. Their MeasureNet hardware is off to successful debut and helped earn them UC's 2006 Emerging Entrepreneur Award.

Date: 7/8/2006 12:00:00 AM
By: Marianne Kunnen-Jones
Phone: (513) 556-2019

Photos By: Andrew Higley

More than 100 installations in universities, community colleges and high schools attest to the potential of the MeasureNet hardware and software that the team of Estel Sprague, PhD, and Robert Voorhees created for use in student chemistry labs.

Estel Sprague and Robert Vorhees

Their networked laboratory data system saves money by connecting 12 workstations in a 24-student lab to a single computer, rather than requiring 12. It also uses a web-based data storage system so that students can easily save and retrieve the results of their experiments.

Sprague and Voorhees invented MeasureNet in 1996 with funding from the National Science Foundation and Procter & Gamble. In 1998, they formed MeasureNet Technology Ltd. and obtained a licensing agreement with UC to market their invention commercially.