James Schwiegerling: It's very exciting to be awarded Inventor of the Year by Tech Launch Arizona. It was a very unexpected and pleasant surprise. The technology that I've primarily been working on, I've been working on for over 10 years so it's a nice culmination of a lot of efforts and a bunch of luck and timing that everything came together. So I am actually just thrilled with receiving the award, but also with all the interactions that I've had with Tech Launch Arizona over the years.

When I first started at the university we would file invention disclosures and they would just tend to disappear, never to be heard of again. And with the advent of Tech Launch Arizona we now had a partner that was very aggressive at looking at our ideas and challenging our ideas and trying to move forward with licensing, patenting, doing spinoff companies and the such. And it was a very refreshing take on trying to get ideas out of the university into the hands of people that can use them.

I'd like to give a little special shout out to a couple people. So Amy Phillips who worked in optical sciences for a long time and was a champion of many of the technologies that's come out of the department. And I also would like to thank all the people at Tech Launch Arizona that have been so supportive over the years with seed funding and advice and pursuing the technologies to this end point.

So in terms of the invention itself it is fortunate that it's something that has had a dramatic impact on the lives of many, many people. I work in an area that develops a technology for the eyes and vision and the lenses that I created have impacted over 500,000 people so far worldwide. And that's just mind boggling to think having that type of impact. And two years ago I actually had the lenses implanted into myself. I'm thrilled with the results, so I can sort of appreciate the results of this technology as well.