As we progress toward an increasingly connected world, sensors will play an essential role in improving personal comfort, industrial manufacturing, transportation and more. Instrumems, a company that sprang from work in the laboratory of Marcus Hultmark, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is building tiny lightweight sensors that can measure temperature, humidity and air velocity. Each sensor consists of a nano-size wire that spans two electrodes.

Gilad Arwatz, who earned his Ph.D. at Princeton working with Hultmark, co-founded the company and is its CEO. “What makes these sensors so unique is their small size as well as the fact that these devices respond to changes very quickly,” Arwatz said. “They are about one to two orders of magnitude faster than the sensor technologies currently available.”