R&D billions are tectonic force in Research Triangle area
Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 8:27 pm 2 Comments | Post a CommentThe brainpower for which North Carolina’s Research Triangle area is known tends to hide inside buildings, behind tall trees or somewhere on sprawling university campuses.
Crossing Research Triangle Park on Interstate 40 or visiting Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or N.C. State University provides little insight into what fuels one of the hottest U.S. research and development hubs.
Michael Walden
Sure, the Triangle was named the brainiest U.S. region and Raleigh the fastest growing metropolitan area last year. And the area’s vaunted labor pool continues to draw scientists and R&D companies from elsewhere, even though companies have closed shop or laid off employees in the past two years and the unemployment rate in the Triangle is nearly twice as high than before the economic downturn.
Mike Walden, an NCSU economist, doesn’t mince words when he assesses how important R&D is for the RTP area. “It’s one of our basic industries,” Walden said. “It’s one of the things that make us tick.”
But what sustains and boosts this industry that, it can be argued, flavors everything locally from schools to restaurants?
The credit usually goes to the three main research universities, Duke, UNC-CH and NCSU, and the hundreds of companies in and around RTP. But what specifically is it that they do to shape the RTP area? Is it the graduates they produce every year, the discoveries they spin off into local startup companies, or the money they spend on R&D? Read more…
Building entrepreneurial networks in the Internet age
Monday, August 16, 2010, 10:51 pm 1 Comment | Post a CommentTed Zoller has taken the educational adage about the village that raises the child and adapted it to entrepreneurship.
As Zoller, the executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business in Chapel Hill, sees it, it takes dealmaker networks to build companies based on research and technology.
One of the U.S. technopolies where these networks have developed is North Carolina’s Research Triangle area, ranked the brainiest area in the U.S. by the Daily Beast, an online publication that started the contest last year.
So, why isn’t the research Triangle Park area also the most entrepreneurial?
Zoller, an entrepreneur himself who teaches executives, scientists and budding entrepreneurs at UNC, attempts to answer that question in an interview with Science in the Triangle. He also addresses how the Internet is changing network building.
The video of the interview is interspersed with footage of Zoller teaching an executive MBA class at UNC:
Canadian biotech will grow flu vaccine in RTP
Tuesday, August 10, 2010, 10:02 pm 1 Comment | Post a CommentMedicago, the Canadian biotech company that announced Tuesday that it picked Research Triangle Park as its production base, plans to introduce vaccine making with a couple of twists to an area that’s home to three large vaccine plants by heavyweights Pfizer, Merck and Novartis.
Medicago’s facility is projected to cost $24 million and create 85 production jobs – small compared to the $300 million plant Novartis opened in 2009 in Holly Springs and the $400 million plant Merck completed two years ago north of Durham. The plant in Sanford that Pfizer bought last year as part of its $68 billion acquisition of Wyeth has been open since the late 1980s and employs about 450.
But then, the Medicago plant isn’t going to be like the other vaccine plants in the area. Read more…
Turning brainpower into companies
Monday, August 2, 2010, 7:45 pm 1 Comment | Post a Comment
Ted Zoller
North Carolina’s Research Triangle last year scored as the brainiest U.S. region, ahead of San Francisco’s Bay Area, which is home to Silicon Valley. Universities in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill and Research Triangle Park, a research and development hub of world renown and state economic engine, had a lot to do with the winning score.
But brainiest doesn’t mean most entrepreneurial as Ted Zoller, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and director of UNC’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, found out. Read more…
RTP scientists look to sun to fuel energy research hub
Friday, July 23, 2010, 7:22 pm 1 Comment | Post a CommentNorth Carolina’s Research Triangle was bested by California to get federal funding for a solar fuels innovation hub. The U.S. Department of Energy last week awarded the $122 million prize to a group led by the California Institute of Technology.
The news was disappointing for the University of North Carolina, Duke University, N.C. State University and RTI International, which make up the Research Triangle Solar Fuels Institute. That was clear when David Myers, RTI’s vice president of engineering and technology, talked to Science in the Triangle the same day the DoE made the announcement.
RTP-area efforts to develop a liquid fuel from sunlight will continue despite the federal funding setback, Myers said. The solar fuels initiative is one of the most active areas of energy research here and a key ingredient in plans to build the Triangle into an energy research hub.
“The area is vastly underrated in the amount of energy research going on,” Myer said.
Watch more of the videotaped Q&A here:
RTI broadens energy research with federal greenbacks
Wednesday, July 14, 2010, 8:54 am No Comments | Post a CommentTechnologies that promise to lower greenhouse gas emissions and demand for U.S. oil imports are becoming more prominent on RTI International’s research smorgasbord, which has featured efforts in a related field, air pollution monitoring, as a reliable staple for the past 30 years.
RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)
One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.
Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.
Pediatrician takes on rare metabolic diseases
Friday, June 4, 2010, 9:48 am No Comments | Post a Comment
Dr. Maria Escolar
Dr. Maria Escolar was a 35-year-old pediatrician overseeing a program for doctors in training at Duke University 12 years ago when she saw her first patient with Krabbe disease.
Named after a Danish neurologist who first described it in 1913, Krabbe disease is a rare, genetic disorder that is painful and damages mental and motor skills. Children with the disease show no symptoms at birth, but without treatment they go deaf and blind and usually die by the time they are 3.
“It’s one of the most horrible diseases I’ve ever encountered,” Escolar said. Read more…
3-D learning with fun and games
Saturday, May 15, 2010, 8:01 am No Comments | Post a Comment(Portions of this story were published May 3 in the Charlotte Observer and the News & Observer.)
PHOTO BY TODD SUMLIN – tsumlin@charlotteobserver.com: Northwest Cabarrus High student Brendon Schaumburg, left, works on his senior project with technology facilitator Julie LaChance.
Teens across the country are starting to play computer games in school – and their teachers encourage them.
It’s called three-dimensional learning, and it has little in common with the 1980s video arcades parents remember.
In North Carolina, high school students who take an elective called “Computer Applications 2″ get introduced to Second Life or ReactionGrid, 3-D virtual worlds in which each player has an avatar – like a digital sock puppet that the user controls. In at least one school district, middle school students sit down at computers to play 3-D games in math and language arts classes.
3-D learning makes immediate sense to anybody born after 1985, because the advances in computer technology that stripped video games of their less-than-wholesome image also made the Internet an integral part of everyday life. For teens growing up in a world of Twitter and Facebook and game consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox, it’s no stretch to slip into an avatar and learn about prime numbers, creative writing or citizenship. Read more…
