After the pandemic,
will Eden Park’s lights dim?
Eden Park, which Gov. J.B. Pritzker visited this week, sells flat-panel ultraviolet lights, including one that disinfects rooms without harming skin.
That’s been quite popular during COVID-19, CEO John Yerger said, but he also expects that to continue, as his customers are looking beyond just this pandemic.
“They’re not even necessarily doing it for COVID. They’re doing it because we had SARS-1, we had Ebola,” he said. “Right now, people want to get this in place, they want to do it right, and then they want to have it available in the future.”
Eden Park sells the panels to other companies, which put them in lighting fixtures that are sold to various industries.
The disinfecting one started out as a product that can detect whether a diamond is natural or manmade, Yerger said.
“We have had this product in the field for three years,” he said.
They’d also partnered with the National Institutes of Health and Columbia University to help prevent hospital-acquired infections.
“That led to the discovery that one particular wavelength of UV is safe for people, and then the discovery that it’s very effective for killing bacteria and viruses,” Yerger said. “And then COVID hit.”
They’ve since “grown dramatically,” he said, tripling the size of their staff in six months.
“We want to continue to hire,” Yerger said.
The company was founded in 2007 based on technology developed by University of Illinois professors J. Gary Eden and Sung-Jin Park.
It started at the UI Research Park before moving a couple years later to its location on Country Fair Drive in west Champaign.
Eden Park “originally started with visible light, and we went through a few iterations,” Yerger said. “And then … the world changed in March, and that’s changed our trajectory and our growth.”