Correspondent photos / Sean Barron Joshua Porter, a Youngstown State University master’s degree student in electrical engineering, looks at the project he entered in Friday’s Innovation Day gathering at the university.

YOUNGSTOWN — If Abbey Strohmeyer’s project design and concept bears ripe fruit, the use and reuse of lithium may reach new heights.

“I’m trying to find a way to recover lithium from spent lithium batteries,” Strohmeyer, a second-year Youngstown State University master’s degree student in chemistry, said.

Lithium batteries are commonly used in cellphones and electric vehicles, along with many electronics, toys, handheld power tools and appliances. Too often, however, such batteries, when spent, are discarded and end up in landfills, with marginal efforts to recycle them, Strohmeyer noted.

Her project’s poster board was among the few dozen that were part of an Innovation Day gathering Friday in YSU’s Williamson College of Business Administration and Kilcawley Center.

Hosting the event was the Northeast Ohio Public Universities Research Alliance. It also was a collaboration between YSU, Northeast Ohio Medical University and the University of Akron, along with Cleveland and Kent State universities.

The gathering was intended to showcase building partnerships between academia and a variety of industries, as well as providing a platform to highlight the interplay of ideas and expertise, organizers said.

An estimated 250 faculty members, students, administrators and experts in business and industry registered for the gathering, Severine Van slambrouck, YSU’s director of research services, said.

Other program goals were to further stimulate collaboration and networking, and fill a gap that often exists between the research and business worlds, Van slambrouck noted.

Recycling used lithium batteries is usually expensive. Another challenge is that the demand for lithium is “exponentially growing” at a time when such batteries are sourced outside of the U.S., Strohmeyer said.

“There’s a lot of potential for a more environmentally-friendly way to get the lithium out,” she added.

A few poster boards that were set up in YSU’s Chestnut Room focused on innovations such as design-thinking methods related to addressing distractions in hospital operating rooms, as well as enhanced micro CT imaging to study back disc degeneration. Others examined ways to handle osteoarthritis, wireless power transmissions in mini drones, boron in thin films and designing a patch for Addison’s disease.

The rare illness can result when the body fails to produce enough of certain hormones. For example, the adrenal glands make too little cortisol and aldosterone, a hormone that is essential for sodium conservation in the kidneys, sweat glands, colon and salivary glands.

Joshua Porter, a YSU master’s degree student in electrical engineering, designed a complex board, with assistance from a few others over the past year, that focused on acquiring data from low-energy Bluetooth peripherals that include YSU tag devices. The “conclusion and future work” portion of Porter’s project, which is still a work in progress, states the challenge of “scanning, connecting to and displaying multiple BLE (Bluetooth low energy) devices’ data concurrently,” a method that will have “potential benefits in health care, industrial automation, smart cities, agriculture and others.”

Innovation Day also featured a variety of classroom sessions, one of which was titled “Growing from Student Researcher to Entrepreneur through the Pixar Pitch.”

The overarching idea was to get the students to view their research through an entrepreneurial mindset and consider who can benefit from it, Jaime Ward-Riley, a senior program officer with the Higher Education in Innovation Ecosystems at Hadley, Massachusetts-based VentureWell, noted.

In the session, Ward-Riley asked students to provide brief pitches on how they feel potential customers can benefit from their offerings, along with how they feel their solutions could solve various problems for a person or group. One student discussed how he felt 3D batteries of varying shapes could be made safer and easier to manufacture.

“You guys are the super experts in what you do,” Camillo Archuleta, another session presenter, said.

Nevertheless, customer bases will care more about how the students’ research will directly benefit them than the research itself, he said.

Archuleta cited the example of SubQ Assist, a company that partnered with Ethiopian health care providers to design a more effective assistive device for contraceptive implants. One of the great benefits from the device — in a country where many rural women have to travel long distances to urban hospitals for care — is a drastic decline in the mortality rate during deliveries, Archuleta noted.