Mark Morrison, a Southern Oregon University graduate, built a tech-heavy, personal-use cooler to keep beverages, such as beer and soda, cold.
But that idea took a turn.
"I realized that this technology I was developing could be used to save lives," he said.
Specifically, it could keep vaccines cold in remote regions.
The beverage cooler morphed into "Cold Connect," an internet-enabled, cooling and monitoring cap that screws onto standard vacuum-insulated hydration flasks.
The World Health Organization estimates up to half of vaccines are wasted globally, often due to a lack of temperature control during transportation.
"It is a huge problem," Morrison said. "It's $34 billion a year in waste."
Morrisons' idea won first place at the 2025 SOU Business Venture Tournament, a campus-wide entrepreneurship contest.
He also won the Visionary Award at InventOR, a state-sponsored, college-level competition that encourages students to take their inventions from concept to reality.
"One of the things I learned that was super valuable wasn't just the techincal skills and building the prototype, it was connecting with your customers," Morrison said. "Through this process, we were able to connect with some NGO groups and begin conversations and talk about their pain points."
ColdConnect was the first-ever win for an SOU project in the contest.
The results included a short YouTube documentary, now used to generate support.
- Mark Morrison, inventor of Cold Connect and an IT infrastructure specialist with the city of Ashland and Ashland Fiber Network
