Stark State College Names Para M. Jones President
North Canton Patch

The Stark State College Board of Trustees unanimously named Dr. Para M. Jones the fourth president in the College’s 51-year history at a special Board meeting today. Jones, president of Spartanburg Community College in Spartanburg, SC, will take the helm as Stark State president Feb. 6, 2012. She succeeds John O’Donnell, who left the college in July to assume the presidency of MassBay Community College in Massachusetts.

Jones, 56, was selected by the board after an extensive nationwide search and interview process conducted by the Board of Trustees, administration, foundation board members and community stakeholders and a search committee comprised of college and community representatives. Faculty, staff, students and community leaders participated in open forums with the finalists and provided input to the board. The process culminated with visits to the campuses of the three presidential finalists.

“I am delighted that Dr. Jones is the choice of our Board to lead the College into the next decade,” said Stark State Board Chair Michael L. Thomas, DDS. “Her leadership, intellect, character and charisma will continue to position Stark State College as a first choice in higher education and a leader in economic growth and community prosperity. Dr. Jones is a perfect fit for our Board, our College and our community, and we welcome her back.”

With more than 24 years of experience and leadership in student access and success, accreditation, strategic and operational planning and execution, institutional research and continuous improvement, Jones has created effective education, business and community partnerships and is deeply committed to the community college mission, diversity and inclusiveness.

“I am so pleased to have this opportunity to return to Stark State and Northeast Ohio, where I spent so much of my professional career and have been deeply rooted in the community,” said Jones. “I appreciate the Board’s confidence, and I look forward to continuing the College’s steadfast commitment to student access, student success and economic development.”

Jones spent 22 years at Stark State prior to becoming president of Spartanburg Community College. At Stark State, she was vice president for advancement, planning, college and community relations from 2005 – 2009. She developed and led the College’s first strategic plan involving extensive stakeholder input from more than 700 faculty, staff, students, alumni, business and community leaders. She also was executive director of the Stark State College Foundation.  Jones led grant and private fundraising efforts that attracted more than $50 million in federal, state, local, public and private funding to support students, academic programs and operations.

She leveraged private and public partnerships to secure building funds and equipment for the Health Sciences Building, W.R. Timken Center for Information Technology, Ralph Regula Wellness and Therapy Center, Automotive Technology Center, Silk Auditorium, Dental Hygiene Clinic and the Advanced Technology Center.

During her tenure at Stark State, she also served as vice president for advancement and student services, executive assistant to the president and director of marketing and communications. Committed to student access and success, Jones led many efforts in the community to provide scholarship opportunities for Stark State students. She was instrumental in the College’s tremendous enrollment growth and the name change from Stark Technical College to Stark State College.

Jones holds a PhD in Higher Education Leadership from the University of Nebraska; an MBA with honors from Ashland University, where she is a member of the Academic Hall of Fame; and a BA from the University of Mount Union, where she graduated magna cum laude with majors in English, communications and Spanish. She is a member of Delta Mu Delta National Honor Society for Business.

A native of Stark County, Jones is a past president of the Jackson-Belden Chamber of Commerce and the Northeast Ohio Naval Academy Parents club. She served on the boards of the David YMCA, Canton Joint Engineering Council, Canton Museum of Art Board and CYC Recreation Center Board.

Jones and her husband Greg reside in Jackson Township. They are the parents of two adult sons.

Stark State College is a two-year state college offering more than 230 associate degree, options, one-year certificates and career enhancement certificates. The College, located in Jackson Township, has an enrollment of 15,551 credit students and approximately 2500 non-credit students. The College is the eighth largest employer in Stark County.

Steris Corp. and Philips Healthcare deals add jobs, punch to Northeast Ohio’s biomedical economy
By Michelle Jarboe McFee, The Plain Dealer The Plain Dealer
 
CLEVELAND, Ohio — With Philips Healthcare and Steris Corp. expecting to add 200 local jobs within a year, state and local leaders see more proof that Northeast Ohio’s medical economy can compete on a national – and sometimes global – stage.

Philips confirmed Tuesday that it will consolidate its nuclear medicine division in Highland Heights, where the multinational company has 1,200 employees.

The project will bring 100 jobs here from San Jose, Calif., at an average salary of $115,000.

Philips considered moving that work, on research and development for medical imaging, to Israel, the Netherlands, China or Russia.

Steris Corp., based in Mentor, will move roughly 25 workers here from a call center in Mississauga, Canada. And the company plans to build a fabrication plant for medical-device parts inside an existing distribution center off Heisley Road.

The facility will create 75 manufacturing and engineering jobs – positions that could have landed in Alabama or Mexico, executives said.

Gov. John Kasich visited both companies Tuesday, to tout deals that won state and local money.

“This is just a gangbuster day,” Kasich told a crowd of workers at Philips’s nearly 1-million-square-foot complex.

The company moved its nuclear medicine headquarters from California to Northeast Ohio in 2006. But research and development for one type of scanning technology, used to diagnose and monitor heart problems and brain and bone disorders, stayed in San Jose.

Collaborations with major hospitals and universities, local suppliers and a concentration of medical-imaging businesses in Northeast Ohio made this region a logical place to expand, said Jay Mazelsky, the company’s senior vice president and general manager for computed tomography and nuclear medicine.

“This sends a signal that Ohio, and Northeast Ohio, is a great biomedical business environment,” said Baiju Shah, chief executive officer of BioEnterprise, a nonprofit focused on the region’s biomedical economy.

Philips will invest $3.5 million in facility renovations and equipment and add $11.5 million in annual payroll. In exchange, the company could receive $11 million in incentives, including a $2.3 million state job-creation tax credit, a $5 million grant from the state’s technology-focused Third Frontier program, a $3 million Cuyahoga County loan and $500,000 from the state-supported Global Cardiovascular Innovation Center in Cleveland.

Medical equipment maker Steris, which employs roughly 1,000 people in Mentor, will spend $8 million on its parts-production facility.

“It was clear to us that Ohio continues to be a manufacturing leader and a great place to make products,” Walt Rosebrough, the company’s president and chief executive, said during a news conference Tuesday.

Making parts here will give Steris new opportunities to work with local suppliers, channeling “several million dollars” to other companies, a spokesman said.

State and local officials offered the company $8 million, but Steris isn’t likely to take a $4 million state loan for building renovations and equipment. Instead, the company plans to secure financing from regional lenders, spokesman Stephen Norton said.

That leaves just under $3.6 million in state grants, tax credits and loans focused on economic development and job-creation.

Workforce development officials in Cuyahoga and Lake counties have offered the company help with worker training, through a deal arranged with assistance from the Greater Cleveland Partnership. And Mentor city officials are considering a payroll-tax reduction for the company. Several parts of the deal aren’t finalized.

Pond scum with promise
by Lynn Meyer, hiVelocity Media

Most people refer to it as “pond scum.” To Ross Youngs, however, it’s a miracle of nature and nothing short of “vital to the future of civilization.”

The “it” is algae, and, according to Youngs, this microscopic plant provides tremendous value to everyone on the planet. “Every single plant on earth can trace its roots to algae,” he explains. “This little plant is at the base of the food chain, and so many other organisms completely depend on it. In fact,” he notes, “algal biomass worldwide is less than one percent of the biomass on earth, but it provides more than 50 percent of the oxygen produced on earth annually. That makes it a pretty important organism.”

Youngs, 54, is so enthusiastic about algae that he took a big gamble in 2008 on the plant playing a major role in the future of biofuels and other products. Long interested in the environment, Youngs earned an associate’s degree in environmental science from the Florida Institute of Technology. He also studied industrial engineering technology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Concerned about pollution, he was dismayed by the proliferation of standard plastic CD cases at the time and was convinced he could develop something more environmentally friendly. He subsequently moved to Ohio for a job in CD production and packaging.

Youngs recalls that, as a young kid, he spent hours tinkering around with mechanical and electrical things. He also went with his dad on jobs repairing X-ray machines. “I’m always looking for ways to do things better, faster, and cheaper,” he explains.

Youngs did just that in response to those plastic CD cases. He designed an alternative — the Safety-sleeve® — that uses 90 percent fewer materials yet protects CDs just as well. With a personal bank loan of $20,000, he established Univenture in 1988 to manufacture his invention and other environmentally-friendly packaging solutions.  
        
Univenture was a big hit. The company earned a slot in Inc. magazine’s “Hall of Fame” for being on the Inc. 500 list of “Fastest Growing Companies” for five years. In 1998, the U.S. Small Business Administration honored Youngs as their “Business Person of the Year.”

Still concerned about the environment and always looking for a challenge, the entrepreneur recalls a conversation he had one day with one of his Univenture staff members about bioplastics and where bioplastic products were going to come from in the future. “That prompted me to look into algae, and I discovered that it was under-investigated commercially,” Youngs says.

So in 2008, Youngs and four of his staff members started researching the biggest obstacle to doing anything with algae – getting it out of the water, where it grows in minuscule concentrations.

At that time, the traditional way to extract algae was with a centrifuge, which was very expensive because it required a lot of energy. Youngs, however, looked to Mother Nature for a better approach. “Plants take in water through their leaves and spread it to all their capillaries, which help move the water throughout the plant,” he explains. This wicking action gave Youngs the idea of combining the adhesion property of liquid with porous treadmill belts to extract algae.

Not only did the process work to dewater algae, it had an important secondary benefit. Once the algae was extracted, the water from which it came was left much cleaner. Youngs established Algaeventures Systems (AVS) in Marysville to develop and market his new technology as an efficient and cost-effective way to harvest, dewater and dry algae.

The process worked so well, in fact, that the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) awarded Algaeventures $6 million in 2009 to develop solid-liquid separation (SLS) and rapid accumulation and concentration technologies. That same year, the company also received an Air Force Research Laboratory award for $360,000.

The equipment that performs the solid-liquid separation to produce dark green flakes of dewatered algae is called the AV Harvester, and the company has developed a pilot model, a smaller lab model and an industrial model. Youngs notes that the pilot and industrial models basically function the same way but are different sizes. During 2009 and 2010, AVS sold its lab model to other algae researchers in Japan, Hungary and the U.S. and its pilot system and licenses for the technology in New Zealand, Austria, Australia and the U.S.

Also in 2010, the company received a $25,000 grant from the Ohio Department of Agriculture to test an algae strategy in Grand Lake St. Marys in western Ohio. “We conducted a test in a small portion of the lake to help a better non-toxic algae outgrow toxic algae,” he notes.

According to Youngs, the company has collaborated with a host of Ohio-based research institutes, universities and corporations, including the Ohio Aerospace Institute, Edison Material Technology, the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson, The Ohio State University, Rockwell Automation, Ohio University, Case Western Reserve University and Battelle. Beyond Ohio, AVS has worked with NASA and Marathon.

AVS also offers evaluation and processing services. “Since we have a unique technology, a variety of businesses contact us,” Youngs says. “We’ve provided evaluation and processing services for companies and organizations in the fields of energy, petroleum and food processing.”

There are other applications for the company’s technology in a variety of non-algae industries, including pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals, mining and minerals, wastewater and industrial effluents and food and beverage. Youngs, who holds 56 U.S. and international patents, established a third company — AlterE — specifically to handle sales to these industries. He also recently added a patent attorney to the AVS team.

Youngs remarks that one of the most exciting things AVS has on tap right now is using the company’s technology to discover biomolecules. “Our technology is unique and very differentiated,” he notes. “It holds great promise for very early stage biomolecule discoveries, and we’ve cultivated relationships for this purpose. There’s significant potential for the drug discovery pipeline and other uses.”

With all three companies located in the same facilities in Marysville, Youngs is aggressively seeking funding for a $9 million expansion that includes equipment and building improvements.  “We’re adding a 2,200-square-foot lab for our chemical and biological operations, and we’re continuing to add more internal research and growth capacity for our work with algae,” he explains. “The Ohio Department of Development has provided low interest funding, which, combined with previously raised equity, totals more than $2.5 million toward our fundraising goal.” The company is looking to land private funds to finance the rest. The project could result in as many as 200 new jobs.

Youngs is enthusiastic about all things algae and sees a bright future in Ohio and the Midwest for continued algae technology. “We have plenty of water, and that’s a huge advantage,” he says. “We’re actually ideally suited for advancing algae technologies to full commercialization for a variety of products and uses.”

Where do things go from here?  With algae showing so much future promise, perhaps the first step from here on out is to stop referring to it as “pond scum.”

Six Organizations Win National Award for Improving Regional Economies Through Science, Technology and Innovation

COLUMBUS, OH, Nov 08, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Six organizations were named winners of SSTI’s 2011 Excellence in TBED award, serving as national models for states and regions investing in science, technology and innovation to grow their economies and create high-paying jobs. Among the winners, a newer program was selected as the first Most Promising TBED Initiative, recognized for a creative approach to growing industry clusters.

“The success stories from this year’s winners characterize why support for tech-based initiatives is imperative for improving the national economy,” said Dan Berglund, SSTI president and CEO. “The diversity in size and geography of these programs demonstrate that many different approaches can be taken with equally impressive outcomes.”

Awards were presented today during SSTI’s 15th Annual Conference in Columbus, OH, attended by local, regional and national leaders in economic development. The following initiatives were named 2011 recipients of SSTI’s Excellence in TBED award:

Kentucky’s Bucks for Brains Endowment Match Program – Expanding the Research Capacity Category By leveraging public and private dollars, Bucks for Brains is expanding research capacity in a targeted way that is novel and useful for other states seeking to achieve similar outcomes. Over a 13-year period, the number of endowed chairs at Kentucky public universities increased from 56 to 252 and the number of endowed professorships increased from 53 to 354. Over that same period, extramural R&D expenditures generated by University of Kentucky and University of Louisville faculty and staff increased from $105.2 million to $364.8 million, a 247 percent increase.

ACTiVATE(R) – Commercializing Research Category ACTiVATE(R) is a catalyst for economic and cultural transformation, helping mid-career women build businesses by leveraging their existing skill set to commercialize technology. Developed as a systematic model for training entrepreneurs and commercializing technology developed by universities and federal labs, the program has been expanded to more broadly focus on the under representation of women in S&T fields by pairing them with promising technologies in order to grow new, high-growth businesses. Participants of the program have created more than 40 new companies, each raising on average $500,000 in seed capital.

CONNECT – Building Entrepreneurial Capacity Category Over its 25-year history, CONNECT has created and continues to evolve a system to expand the entrepreneurial capacity of the San Diego region. Drawing on more than 1,500 volunteers, CONNECT assists researchers in validating commercialization potential, developing commercial strategies and providing entrepreneurial education to grow high-tech and life sciences companies. CONNECT has assisted in the formation and development of more than 3,000 companies, which have raised more than $10 billion in funding, and has been modeled in more than 50 regions worldwide.

BioEnterprise – Increasing Access to Capital Category BioEnterprise is a Cleveland-based nonprofit business formation, recruitment and acceleration initiative focused on accelerating the growth of biomedical companies. Recognized for its transferable market-driven model, BioEnterpise demonstrates leadership in the financing community, having assisted more than 100 clients to attract more than $1.1 billion in growth capital from grant, seed, angel, venture, and debt sources. Since 2002, BioEnterprise has evaluated more than 1,400 biomedical opportunities resulting in more than 160 clients who receive counsel from seasoned, biomedical executives with startup and growth experience.

Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies (CIMS) at Rochester Institute of Technology – Improving Competitiveness of Existing Industries Category Established in 1992, CIMS has increased the competitiveness of manufacturers in Upstate New York by providing world-class research, technology development expertise, and laboratories that help companies market expansion, enhance productivity, speed innovation and product development, and train personnel. CIMS has been innovative in adapting its expertise and services to meet the evolving needs of manufacturers by focusing on the region’s strongest industry clusters. Since 2002, the program has helped to create more than 1,581 jobs and retain 1,915 positions throughout the state.

NorTech Regional Innovation Cluster Model – Most Promising TBED Initiative Category Through its grassroots approach to cluster development, NorTech’s Regional Innovation Cluster Model puts theory into practice to overcome challenges and accelerate successful clusters to create jobs and attract capital. The impressive partnerships and model developed by NorTech are applicable for developing industry clusters across the nation that have a long-term positive economic impact. In just one year, cluster companies supported by NorTech have attracted $20.5 million in capital, created 171 jobs and generated $10.8 million in payroll.

“Each of these programs has adapted to changing needs and are capitalizing on emerging opportunities,” Berglund said. “We encourage all of those involved in improving the nation’s competitiveness to seek out the best practices of our current and past award winners.”

Now in its fifth year of the awards program, SSTI has recognized 26 initiatives for their successful efforts to support the creation and growth of technology companies.

About SSTI The State Science and Technology Institute is a national nonprofit organization that leads, supports and strengthens efforts to improve state and regional economies through science, technology and innovation. www.ssti.org