Welch Allyn Engineer Wins Distinguished Inventor of the Year Award Presented by RIPLA

Welch Allyn, a leading medical diagnostic device company that specializes in helping clinicians improve patient outcomes, today announced Ervin Goldfain, lead engineer, product development, was selected as the recipient of the 2013 Distinguished Inventor of the Year Award presented by the Rochester Intellectual Property Law Association (RIPLA). The Inventor of the Year Award recognizes an individual or team of individuals for their contributions to useful applications of science and technology. Goldfain was nominated by Roger Bonenfant, associate general counsel at Welch Allyn.

“Ervin continuously works to better physical assessment devices for primary care clinicians,” said Bonenfant. “He has made significant contributions to many Welch Allyn devices that help improve patient outcomes. Ervin also played a lead role developing the patented technology for the Welch Allyn MacroView™ Otoscope, PanOptic™ Ophthalmoscope and SureSight™ Vision Screener, all of which are part of our Patent Hall of Fame. Each aspect of his job requires exceptional innovation in terms of generating ideas to deliver new products from the engineering space to the marketplace.”

RIPLA has annually recognized an individual or team of individuals as the Distinguished Inventor of the Year since 1973 and nominations for the award come from the RIPLA membership. The award winners represent a wide cross-section of fields ranging from academia and independent entrepreneurial efforts to Fortune 500 corporate research and development organizations and the winners make up a virtual “who’s who” in innovation for the Rochester area.

“On behalf of RIPLA and the Distinguished Inventor of the Year selection committee, I would like to extend my congratulations to Mr. Goldfain and Welch Allyn on receiving this well-deserved honor,” said Dominic Ciminello, vice president of RIPLA. “Not only has Mr. Goldfain developed a fairly large number of successful designs and projects for frontline care and ophthalmology, he has also been published in many scientific journals and contributed to books dealing with various topics of theoretical physics. His work has already been honored by several prestigious research and development awards, and we are proud that he can now add RIPLA’s Distinguished Inventor of the Year to that list.”

Goldfain will receive the award on Thursday, May 2, at the 41st Annual Rochester Intellectual Property Law Association Distinguished Inventor of the Year Award Ceremony.

Goldfain currently works in the applied technology group at Welch Allyn and has been with the company since 1990. He attended the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest in Romania and continued his education at the Rochester Institute of Optics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California, Berkeley.