STIRLING, SCOTLAND-Cascade Technologies has won the Science and Technology Entrepreneur of the Year title at the Ernst & Young Scotland Entrepreneur of the Year Awards 2007. The company, created in 2003, has developed and patented the world’s first real-time technology for the monitoring of gas, emissions, and explosives based on the use of mid-infrared quantum-cascade lasers (QCLs).
Cascade business development director Richard Cooper said, “We were short-listed alongside a clinical research organization involved in cancer treatments research and a biosciences company which has created a new paradigm for drug discovery. Both were outstanding candidates for the award and we are honored to receive such important recognition, which is testament to all the hard work put-in by everyone involved within the organization.”
The Entrepreneur of the Year Award is a regional, national, and international awards program founded and produced by Ernst & Young in the United States in 1986. The awards are a culmination of ten months of interviews, regional heats, and a national judging session that takes place in London by an independent judging panel of leading entrepreneurs. It recognizes the determination, hard work, and passion of entrepreneurs in over 40 countries on six continents.
Cascade Technologies has established a centre of excellence in QC laser applications and is now offering solutions to real-world problems in global warming and homeland security. In May, the company released a low-cost tunable mid-infrared laser system alongside a range of affordable QC lasers. The scientific applications include spectroscopy and characterisation of optical components. Cascade’s gas analysis instrumentation is now being deployed in harsh environments to measure a range of combustion gases including sulphur and nitrous oxides. Custom products can be created for industries facing challenging measurement and detection issues. In homeland-security applications, the system can also rapidly be deployed to screen individuals, objects, and critical infrastructures for explosives, chemical agents, or narcotics.
Richard Cooper said, “Our technology already has a global presence through commercial agreements with a number of global organizations and as we enter an era where environmental emissions controls and security are taking on even greater significance, we believe our technology can be at the forefront of future development. We have developed strategic agreements with global suppliers which have allowed us to drive major technology developments through improved component yield, reproducibility, quality, lower costs, and reduced lead time.”
In the past year the company has secured a further $5 million dollar investment and joined forces with BP to develop an emissions monitoring system for use in the marine industry. This activity has been backed by a strategic licensing agreement with Lucent Technologies that enables Cascade to source its lasers from manufacturers anywhere throughout the world.
Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)
Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.