Associate Professor Joseph Covi Among National Class of Emerging Inventors

Joseph Covi, associate professor in the Department of Biology and Marine Biology, is among 162 emerging academic inventors named to the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) 2025 class of Senior Members. The largest class to date, this year’s honorees hail from 64 NAI Member Institutions across the nation and have collectively been named inventors on over 1,200 U.S. patents. 

Covi joins fellow faculty members Yaw Chang (mathematics and statistics), Karl Ricanek (computer science) and Yishi Wang (mathematics and statistics) as NAI Senior Members. 

Since his arrival to UNCW in 2012, Covi has patented an invention which provides methods and kits for determining sediment and pore water toxicity.  

“I’ve deeply enjoyed training student inventors during my time here,” Covi said. “My goal as a mentor is to provide a foundation for individuals to clearly see and then achieve their career ambitions.  

Two of Covi’s current students, undergraduate honors student Rochelle David and doctoral student Auden Block, are developing their own inventions to improve toxicity testing for zooplankton from lakes and estuaries.  

“One of the students is focused on educational use, which is a passion of theirs. The other is interested in engineering devices that anyone can build to run high powered experiments,” Covi said. “The goal of all our inventions is to revolutionize toxicity testing by decreasing cost while increasing the ecological relevance and reproducibility.” 

The full 2025 class of Senior Members is available at the National Academy of Inventors website.

The class will be celebrated during the Senior Member Induction Ceremony at NAI’s 14th Annual Conference taking place June 23-26 in Atlanta, Ga.