9:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Delaware Biotechnology Institute

15 Innovation Way, Newark, DE

• NO CHARGE for Delaware companies. Lunch is included.

• Workshop focus is National Science Foundation (NSF) proposals

Apply now for our SBIR Workshop on April 19th. Presented by SBIR expert Bhramara Tirupati of Biotechnologies Business Consultants based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This program provides valuable advice, tools, and insight on what it takes to win an SBIR grant. In addition, at the end of the workshop, you will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with our SBIR expert to discuss your plan.

After you complete the workshop, we will provide additional hands-on help with the development of your SBIR proposal. Assistance includes SBIR topic selction, proposal development and review, research, and more.

Class size is limited. To reserve your seat, contact technology advisor Gary Simon by phone: 302-831-0772 or email: simong@udel.edu today!

Delaware SBIR Gateway Program

The federal government’s SBIR/STTR grant program is a competitive funding source, awarding more than $2.5 billion annually to small businesses developing technologies that are important to federal agencies such as the Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Transportation. The Delaware SBIR Gateway Program is Delaware’s premier resource dedicated to helping researchers and entrepreneurs with innovative technologies win SBIR awards to achieve technology commercialization milestones.

The Delaware SBIR Gateway Program is a selective, in-depth program covering all steps necessary for winning SBIR grants. To be successful with SBIR, the technology must be commercializable and a topic of interest to one of the participating federal agencies.  The application period is open three times per year.

Prior to be being accepted into the Gateway Program, interested parties must submit an application and all required documentation. Application materials are reviewed by SBTDC staff and external SBIR partners for technical soundness and commercialization potential. Upon selection into the Delaware SBIR Gateway Program, participants receive individualized support from SBIR experts from the application development stage to submission and post-award notification.

The DSBTDC can help you:

• Identify and select agencies and topics that best suit your innovation
• Gather information for your proposal
• Search technical and market literature
• Discuss commercialization considerations
• Review and critique your proposal
• Develop project budgeting

Applying for the Program

While the program is selective, the application process is simple. First, complete the Delaware SBIR Gateway application and include the requested supporting documentation.  Next, the SBIR Gateway team will evaluate your application. This evaluation will help us become familiar with your company and its technology.  Grant strategies will be developed based on the current stage of your company and technology. The SBIR Gateway team will then make final recommendations for acceptance into the program. Accepted applicants are required to attend a two-day workshop, which outlines all aspects of proposal preparation, including electronic submission and commercialization plans. Finally, accepted participants will have one-on-one consultations with SBIR experts who will walk them through the proposal process, including scientific and editorial review of the proposal, and final grant application. There is no charge for these services to accepted participants.

Eligibility

To be eligible for the SBIR Gateway Program, participants must meet the following program criteria for their business:

• Be located in Delaware
• Have rights to the proposed technology or access to innovative technology
• Form a company by the time an award is made
• Have a plan for dedicated lab space
• Identify a qualified principal investigator (PI) to attend the mandatory two-day workshop
• Note: The PI must be the primary author of the grant application and have a project team and facilities in place to carry out the project.
• Comply with the federal SBIR guidelines

For more information about the Delaware SBIR Gateway Program, or to obtain an application, call Gary Simon at the DSBTDC 302-831-0772 or email simong@udel.edu

The Delaware SBTDC is a unit of the University of Delaware’s Office of Economic Innovation and Partnerships and is funded in part through a cooperative agreement with the SBA and the State of Delaware.

K. Eric Wommack

K. Eric Wommack, professor of environmental microbiology in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at the University of Delaware, is part of a five-year, $25 million U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) study aimed at preventing potentially fatal illnesses linked to Shiga toxin-producing E. coli bacteria (STEC) in the nation’s food supply.

STEC poses a serious threat to the food supply, resulting in more than 265,000 infections in the United States each year.

The coast-to-coast study includes a team of 48 investigators from multiple universities and government agencies, with the University of Nebraska and Kansas State University as the lead institutions.

Wommack became involved with the project after serving on a USDA grant review panel with Jim Keen, the lead project director from the University of Nebraska, who had been studying STEC for a number of years and was putting together the project proposal.  “It was really just good fortune on my part to be lucky enough to be involved with the group,” said Wommack, adding that he has not previously worked with STEC but can potentially bring a new angle to the research through his experience in microbial ecology.

As a microbial ecologist, Wommack said he is “interested in all the microbes that make up communities of microbes.” He equated this to an environmental ecologist, only instead of looking at “all the plant species within the make-up of the forest or the grassland, I look at all the microbes that comprise a microbial community.”

For this study, Wommack will examine the microbial communities that form around STEC to see if there is a pattern that scientists can pinpoint. This would allow the researchers to trace non-toxic levels of STEC by determining the kinds of microbial communities where it is most likely to occur.

“It is difficult to detect STEC when it is at the non-poisonous levels, but it is still there and so my work may show that there are other microbes that just happen to occur alongside STEC but are a whole lot easier to find. It is not like (STEC) is the only bacteria in a cow, so we are interested in looking at the larger communities that surround the pathogenic organisms.”

Wommack also will try to understand the ecology of STEC on a fundamental level.  “Although it is an organism that is an awful pathogen and kills people,” Wommack explained, “it is also a microbe that is out there and it has to live in whatever environment it is found in, and so most everything we know about STEC is when it is making people sick. We don’t really know much about it other than that — meaning its place in the ecology of microbial communities.”

Wommack said he is excited to get started on this research project, anticipating that he may begin work as soon as March. “It is hard to argue against knowing more,” he said. “Knowing and understanding more about the biology and the ecology of the organism will ultimately help us to control its incidence in the food supply.”

About Prof. Wommack

K. Eric Wommack is a professor in UD’s Department of Plant and Soil Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

He also has appointments in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences and in the marine biology and biochemistry program in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. His laboratory is based in the Delaware Biotechnology Institute.

Wommack received a doctorate in marine estuarine environmental sciences from the University of Maryland, a master’s degree in physiology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Emory University in Atlanta.

He is a member of the American Society for Microbiology, the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography and the International Society for Microbial Ecology.

Article by Adam Thomas

Photo by Evan Krape

WASHINGTON – Today, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) invited two local Delaware business leaders to join a Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee Meeting in Washington, DC. Representatives of Incyte Corporation and Computer Aid Inc. (CAI). joined a handful of other small- and medium-sized company representatives from across the United States that have done well and contributed to job growth – despite a sluggish economy. At the meeting, the company representatives and Senators, including Sen. Carper and Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), discussed how these businesses are strengthening local economies, creating jobs, and how their efforts may be replicated nationally.

Sen. Carper has released video and audio footage of his post-meeting conversation with representatives from both Incyte and CAI:

Sen. Carper’s conversation with local business leaders

FTP links to access Sen. Carper’s conversation with local business leaders:

HD VIDEO: http://gp1d.senate.gov/sdmc/Carper/020112_CARPER_1_FTP.M2T
SD VIDEO: http://gp1d.senate.gov/sdmc/Carper/020112_CARPER_1_FTP.MPG
AUDIO: http://gp1d.senate.gov/sdmc/Carper/020112_CARPER_1_AUDIO.mp3

Click Image to Watch the Video

Ed. Note: On video from left: Mr. David Hastings, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Inycte Corporation; Mr. Frank “Skip” Pennella, Director of External Affairs, Computer Aid Inc. (CAI), Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.)

About the Senate Democratic Steering & Outreach Committee

The Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee facilitates an ongoing conversation between Senate Democrats and the American public. Each year, the Steering and Outreach Committee hosts several meetings with advocates, policy experts, business leaders, elected officials, and community leaders to discuss key priorities and enlist their help in the development of the Democratic agenda in the Senate. These meetings are open forums for discussion between members of communities around the country and members of the Democratic Caucus.

“We are pleased to be partnering with one of the most widely read newspapers in the world,” said Joseph Budner Elad, CEO, Quantum Leap Innovations. “TwitterMeter will allow readers to not only read news, but digest data and trends, thus helping them make decisions that impact their businesses, personal lives and even entertainment choices. We have worked hard to innovate Pattern Based Analytics and are pleased that The Economic Times is using Quantum Leap Buzz to provide relevant information to its readers. They are the perfect partner for launching TwitterMeter to the world.”

Quantum Leap Innovations’ social media analytics product, Quantum Leap Buzz, is the first Pattern Based Analytics tool to distill, not just filter, trending social themes from Twitter, and deliver instant and relevant intelligence which identifies and quantifies social insights. The new release of the Quantum Leap Buzz, Consumer Edition, will be available February 29 for $10. It includes a complex morphing graphic that shows computational progress as the Quantum Leap Buzz builds social pattern relationships between tweeters, their tweets and their re-tweeting followers. Displayed after you hit the “Search Now” button, you can pass your mouse over blocks of trending patterns to see centers of influence and identify the resulting social network. This dynamic display is just a taste of the Pattern Based Analytic power to be available in the Quantum Leap Buzz, Business Edition.

Quantum Leap Innovations was founded in 1999. The company developed a suite of Pattern Based Analytics products. Until recently, Pattern Based Analytics technologies were used exclusively in the government defense and intelligence space. For instance, the United States Government used Quantum Leap Innovations Pattern Based Analytics to respond to the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic.

Quantum Leap and Quantum Leap Innovations are registered trademarks; and Quantum Leap Buzz is a trademark of Quantum Leap Innovations.

About Quantum Leap Innovations

Begun in 1999, Quantum Leap Innovations, Inc. has established itself as a trailblazer in Pattern Based Analytics, creating the Quantum Leap(R) Pattern Based Analytics suite of products that includes Pattern Based Discovery, Pattern Based Prediction, and Pattern Based Reasoning — all based on transparent, flexible discovery, visualization and analysis of informative patterns in large, complex data environments for strategic forecasting and decision making.

Quantum Leap Innovations has worked extensively in the public and private sectors, including contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Intelligence Community, CSC, DuPont, Exelon, Ford, IBM, SAIC, Texas Instruments, and Verizon. Quantum Leap Innovations’ sophisticated Pattern Based Analytics products were essential in the U.S. government’s decision to keep the U.S./Mexico border open during the H1N1 pandemic.

Quantum Leap is headquartered in the Delaware Technology Park, which is affiliated with the University of Delaware and is located in Newark, Delaware.

SOURCE: Quantum Leap Innovations

Media:

Coltrin & Associates (for Quantum Leap Innovations)

Steffanie Anderson, +1-212-221-1616

Steffanie_anderson@coltrin.com

or

Coltrin & Associates (for Quantum Leap Innovations)

Jennifer Webb, +1-212-221-1616

jennifer_webb@coltrin.com

or

Economic Times

Neeti Chopra

neeti.chopra@timesgroup.com

Many in Delaware paid special attention to the disaster. For nearly 15 years, Delaware and Miyagi have been sister states, trading annual visits with dignitaries and business leaders, and fostering an exchange program that’s sent hundreds of Delaware students to Miyagi and vice versa.

A delegation from Miyagi’s government came to Dover on Monday for the first time since the quake and tsunami to express appreciation for Delaware’s support.

In the weeks after the quake and tsunami, state officials organized a special fund to collect donations from Delawareans and send them to Miyagi.

In just a few months, donors from across the state raised $101,000.

“The citizens of Delaware provided psychological and physical support in the form of powerful messages of encouragement and monetary donations,” said Takamasa Chiba, director of international affairs for Miyagi Prefecture and leader of the delegation.

“Fueled by the kind support of the people of Delaware, the people of Miyagi are coming together,” he said.

Most of the donated funds are paying for the schooling of children who lost one or both parents in the disaster. Chiba said every child in kindergarten through high school will receive a scholarship of 10,000 yen per month — about $130.

The rest of Delaware’s aid fund covered emergency supplies for victims and contributed to infrastructure repairs.

In Miyagi, 9,500 people were killed, virtually all by the tsunami; 2,000 are still listed as missing.

During its presentation at Dover High School, Chiba’s delegation showed a short compilation of video clips and photographs of the disaster and the aftermath.

One video, shot from the window of a four- or five-story building, shows the roiling, debris-filled waters of the tsunami rushing through an urban area, carrying cars and huge sections of buildings with great speed. In the background, people cry and scream.

“All of these images look like a science fiction film, but unfortunately this is what happened in our hometown,” said Masayoshi Suguwara, a deputy in Miyagi’s international affairs division.

But the message delivered by the delegation was one of hope, optimism and rebuilding.

Only about 4.5 percent of Miyagi was affected by the disaster, and the local government focused on helping relocate those who lost their homes, or providing them with prefabricated housing.

Suguwara highlighted the reopening of Sendai’s international airport, a local Toyota factory that builds Corollas and the main Miyagi station of the shinkansen bullet train.

However, it will likely be a decade or more, the delegation said, before Miyagi’s world-famous fishing industry can recover. Because of their proximity to the coast, businesses like fish markets, packing houses and shippers were destroyed, along with hundreds of commercial fishing boats.

Chiba said while Miyagi would appreciate ongoing monetary support from Delaware, the best thing Delawareans can do is visit.

“I’d like to see the people of Delaware take an opportunity to come over and see us in Miyagi, and see that it’s not all devastated,” he said. “We are doing our best with the recovery.”

Miki Smith, who lives in Dover and coordinates the Miyagi student-exchange program, said the first group of Japanese students to visit since the tsunami will be arriving this spring — 52 in all.

In June, Smith said, a group of Delaware students will travel to Miyagi.

She said the delegation’s visit Monday and another event coming up in March are the first steps to moving on from the disaster.

“We have a very tight friendship; it was almost like losing your best friend,” Smith said of the months after the disaster. “I think it’s a good thing for our children to see them, so they can learn how things are recovering, keep encouraging them.”

Contact Doug Denison at 678-4271, on Twitter @DoverDelDenison or at ddenison@delawareonline.com.

On February 29 the Newark, Delaware, based company will release Quantum Leap Buzz, a tool that uses pattern based analytics for social media, starting with Twitter, to mine data from the huge amounts of information created on these sites every day.

The tool, which can be downloaded from the company’s website for $10 a year, allows users to search for words or phrases and then identifies themes and trends around the search giving a sense of their popularity.

“We’ve developed the pattern based analytics through government contracts that examined geo-political, world health and military trends,” said Elad.

“We are also working on a business edition which will have features that Buzz Leap does not,” Elad told Reuters on Wednesday, adding the enterprise model will be released in the first week of April for $500 annually.

The explosion of digital data and tools for analyzing the information is seen as a major business opportunity for companies to gain insights and monetize them. It also useful for law enforcement.

IBM Corp, which has long bet on data analytics, recently released new software making it easier for companies to sift through messages, posts and presentations, both internally and externally.

According to research by network security firm Palo Alto Networks, activity on social networks increased 300 percent in second half of last year compared with the same period in 2010.

“We’re drowning in streams of information and you really have to be a great swimmer,” Elad said, adding that his company plans eventually to expand its technology to help users spot popular topics or new themes on Facebook and Google+, too.

Elad, who was born in Israel and studied chemical engineering and computer science in Delaware, has launched several software companies.

One of his goals is to reach one million users for Buzz Leap, although he said it was too early to tell how long that would take.

Asked if he would consider a public listing of the company he founded in 1999, Elad said: “That’s still a far ways off, right now I am not in debt and I am profitable.”

And that’s where Accudyne Systems, of Newark, comes in. When no such machine already exists to make new products, clients come in seeking help in creating automated manufacturing processes.

For instance, DuPont wanted a way to put colorful images, like sports logos, into the tint portion of auto windshields. The challenge was to keep the paint from smudging as it dried, said Ralph Cope, Accudyne’s president.

Mechanical engineer Tracy Dolan assembles a prototype at Accudyne in Newark. / THE NEWS JOURNAL/ROBERT CRAIG

And so Accudyne worked with DuPont to create a device that blew air as soft as an air hockey table as it moved the product through the machine. The material couldn’t be touched for fear of distorting the image.

DuPont, in turn, licensed the machine to other companies.

“People come to us with a problem and a blank sheet of paper,” Cope said.

Ralph Cope is president and co-founder of Accudyne.

Engineers and clients brainstorm with the help of a dry erase board. Then the engineers mock up a three-dimensional image on a computer, before building the device in a sprawling machine shop in back.

“We don’t build two of anything. We built onesies,” Cope said.

Accudyne is located in the Pencader Office Park, having moved to the larger

Ralph Cope is president and co-founder of Accudyne.

site nine months ago from Sandy Brae Industrial Park, also in Newark.

Cope grew up west of Wilmington, and was one of the first graduates of the University of Delaware’s Center for Composite Materials, before receiving his doctorate from Ohio State University.

He went on to teach mechanical engineering design at UD, but departed to found the company, in a garage, in 1996 with Brian Waibel. Waibel left the company last year, but retains an ownership stake, Cope said. Mark Gruber, the company’s chief financial officer, is also a partner.

Today, the company has 30 employees and has annual revenues of about $6 million.

The company has worked with the military on several projects over the last few years.

For instance, Accudyne engineered a device that makes helmets for the Army Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.

The helmets are made of a variation on Kevlar — DuPont’s impact-resistant fabric — and can either be lighter or more bullet-resistant, said Shawn Walsh, team leader at the lab’s Agile Manufacturing Technology Team.

For every product that gets made, someone needs to make a machine to form it.

And that’s where Accudyne Systems, of Newark, comes in. When no such machine already exists to make new products, clients come in seeking help in creating automated manufacturing processes.

For instance, DuPont wanted a way to put colorful images, like sports logos, into the tint portion of auto windshields. The challenge was to keep the paint from smudging as it dried, said Ralph Cope, Accudyne’s president.

And so Accudyne worked with DuPont to create a device that blew air as soft as an air hockey table as it moved the product through the machine. The material couldn’t be touched for fear of distorting the image.

DuPont, in turn, licensed the machine to other companies.

“People come to us with a problem and a blank sheet of paper,” Cope said.

Engineers and clients brainstorm with the help of a dry erase board. Then the engineers mock up a three-dimensional image on a computer, before building the device in a sprawling machine shop in back.

“We don’t build two of anything. We built onesies,” Cope said.

Accudyne is located in the Pencader Office Park, having moved to the larger site nine months ago from Sandy Brae Industrial Park, also in Newark.

Cope grew up west of Wilmington, and was one of the first graduates of the University of Delaware’s Center for Composite Materials, before receiving his doctorate from Ohio State University.

He went on to teach mechanical engineering design at UD, but departed to found the company, in a garage, in 1996 with Brian Waibel. Waibel left the company last year, but retains an ownership stake, Cope said. Mark Gruber, the company’s chief financial officer, is also a partner.

Today, the company has 30 employees and has annual revenues of about $6 million.

The company has worked with the military on several projects over the last few years.

For instance, Accudyne engineered a device that makes helmets for the Army Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.

The helmets are made of a variation on Kevlar — DuPont’s impact-resistant fabric — and can either be lighter or more bullet-resistant, said Shawn Walsh, team leader at the lab’s Agile Manufacturing Technology Team.

Walsh said Accudyne’s expertise in manufacturing “allowed us to put our creative DNA” into making the device.

A team of engineers at Accudyne was busy last week making another product for the Army lab, a machine that makes panels that are tested for resistance to gunfire.

“Not many people do what we do,” said Ross Hutter, a senior partner at Accudyne.

Accudyne also makes manufacturing processes for parts for Airbus and Boeing aircraft. The aircraft business requires updates no matter what the economy, making the recession years good ones for Accudyne, Cope said.

Accudyne has also made machines to spray glaze on Lenox china plates.

One of the smallest products the company has made is a 10-pound electronic baby, which allows doctors to practice deliveries. The “baby” can indicate whether the doctor is pulling too hard, for instance.

And one of the largest, Cope said, is a support structure for a helium balloon used to fix things on mountaintops, like wind turbines.

“There’s nothing that’s out of bounds,” he said.

Contact Aaron Nathans at 324-2786 or anathans@delawareonline.com.

Quantum Leap founder Joseph Elad shows some of his technical innovations. The company looks for patterns in human behavior (as well as the movement of pathogens, etc.).

Joseph Budner Elad has sought patterns in roadside bombings in war, and the path of deadly pathogens.

Now, Elad, president and CEO of Quantum Leap Innovations of Newark, has begun putting his company’s pattern-seeking technology to more everyday use for business.

For instance, the software can examine whether patients who get readmitted to a hospital share certain traits, or which other products a bank customer might be likely to buy.

Elad, originally of Israel, uses technology he calls “pattern-based analytics.”

“We’re just scratching the surface of what can be done,” he said.

Predictive analytics, also known as data mining, is widespread in the field of business intelligence. But Elad has managed to find a new twist, said Tom Davenport, professor of information technology and management at Babson College in Massachusetts.

Most analytics use regression, a statistical technique that’s been around for a century, which helps explain the relationship between variables, he said.

What Elad is doing is pattern matching, which is more complicated and relies on artificial intelligence, Davenport said. By establishing that something has taken place in the past, it predicts what will happen in the future, he said.

“We’re drowning in information. That’s why Google is so successful,” said Michael Cusumano, SMR Distinguished Professor of Management and Engineering Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a new member of Quantum Leap’s board.

Quantum Leap’s interface is similar to Google’s, which allows the customer to ask simple questions and draw upon large amounts of data for the answers, Cusumano said.

Whereas Google’s search tool harvests the Internet with “brute force,” Quantum Leap’s products allow for a more exacting search of private databases, he said.

Elad came to the United States in 1980 to attend the University of Delaware, where he studied chemical engineering and computer science.

It was there he met his future wife, Faith, which he said is what kept him in this area.

As he pursued his doctorate, he was offered the chance to run a startup database management company after the previous owner died in a car accident.

Several startups later, he founded Quantum Leap in 1999. Today, the company employs 15 and has multiple contractors, all in the United States, he said.

Quantum Leap’s chief science officer is Ganesh Vaidyanathan, who used to work at DuPont doing pharmaceutical analytics. Cusumano called him a “world expert” in data mining.

The company has performed $32.5 million in contract work for the Department of Defense, mainly the Navy, Elad said.

Quantum Leap’s first contract was an Air Force effort to recast the B-52 bomber away from its nuclear origins, and to form computer models about where to station them in the world, he said.

That, he said, helped during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, as the bombers were already in the right places, he said.

About four years ago, Quantum worked with the Defense Department to examine roadside bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan, to determine whether the patterns demonstrated in past attacks could help predict new ones.

And his company assisted the military in modeling the H5N1 “bird flu” and H1N1 “swine flu” outbreaks, helping the government decide not to close the Mexican border and domestic airports for the latter outbreak.

Such work has been rewarding, but going outside of government contract work could bring less volatility, he said.

“It’s very difficult to predict what will happen with the government,” Elad said.

Today, Quantum Leap is working with Christiana Care on identifying patients with a high risk for cancer, and Thomas Jefferson University on how genes impact disease.

Jim Mazarakis, executive vice president at WSFS Bank, said his company uses Quantum Leap’s pattern recognition technology for determining which customers would be good candidates for more of its core banking products.

WSFS has also been using Quantum Leap Buzz, an analytical search engine to follow what WSFS customers are saying, as well as comments about competitors.

The online tool searches for Twitter postings and groups them into those referencing sub-topics.

This, Mazarakis said, gave WSFS insight into the consumer backlash against new debit card fees at other banks, before the story hit the mainstream press.

It’s a faster, and purer, way of getting to know what the public is thinking than using a focus group, he said. The tool is free until — wait for it — leap day, Feb. 29, 2012, after which the company will offer it as a subscription service.

Elad’s “leading edge” technology has a lot of potential in the marketplace, but the challenge is being able to explain it to prospective customers, Davenport said.

They may not understand the guts of the complicated technology, and may have to take it on faith that it works, he said.

But this approach will become more prominent as the years go by, he said.

“The future’s pretty bright for this company,” Davenport said.

Jennifer Kmiec, DESCA Executive Director

“Jennifer Kmiec is a seasoned leader who brings strong technology-based economic development, marketing and coalition-building skills to the position,” said Lori Palmer, DESCA President and Chairperson. “Having a full-time director is a big step forward in DESCA’s efforts to serve as a catalyst for innovation in sustainable chemistry and renewable materials in Delaware and the region. When that leader is someone of Jennifer’s reputation and experience, it increases the impact and results the organization can achieve. We are thrilled she is on board.”

Kmiec said, “I’m extremely excited to have this opportunity to apply my skills, knowledge and contacts to this endeavor. The companies and universities in Delaware are very active in green chemistry and renewable materials R&D and I look forward to working with DESCA’s board and coalition of partners to advance and promote this important regional innovation cluster.”

Kmiec will seek to expand the number of corporate and academic partners in the Delaware Sustainable Chemistry Alliance by utilizing non-profit start-up skills she developed while serving as a founding board member and Chair of the Delaware BioScience Association and founding Vice Chair of the Bioscience Association of West Virginia.

She with utilize her 20-plus years of private sector management experience to promote innovations in sustainable chemistry, facilitate collaborative projects and attract federal grants and investments to the region. She previously held marketing, business development and operations positions at biotechnology companies, including Newark-based iBio, Inc., Athena Biotechnologies and Tapestry Pharmaceuticals.

Kmiec earned a biological science degree from Southern Illinois University and an MBA from the University of California at Davis.

About the Delaware Sustainable Chemistry Alliance

DESCA’s mission is to foster sustainable chemistry and renewable materials innovation among key stakeholders in industry, government and academia. DESCA serves as facilitators to promote collaborations and link resources in ways that can both optimize essential R&D funding and translate the benefits of new discoveries in sustainable technologies into commercial opportunities and high-wage jobs for the Delaware region. For more information, visit www.desustainablechem.org.

Contact: Jennifer Kmiec (302) 319-3190

From left to right: Katie Macklin, Executive Director, Alzheimer's Association of Delaware, Dr. Nouredeeine Melichi, Dean of Sciences, Delaware State University, Dr. Mark Barteau, Sr. Vice Prov. for Research & Strategic Initiatives, U of D, The Honorable Thomas Carper, U.S. Senator for the State of Delaware, Michael Bowman, Chairman and President, Delaware Technology Park, Dr. Kelvin Lee, Director, Delaware Biotechnology Institute, Bob Dayton, President, Delaware BioScience Association

U.S. Sen. Thomas R. Carper was honored with the Champion of Jobs Creation Through Innovation Award presented by the Delaware chapter of We Work for Health during a ceremony hosted by the Delaware BioScience Association (Delaware Bio) and the Delaware Biotechnology Institute (DBI) on Friday, Dec. 9.

Receiving the award, Carper said, “This award is undeserved but not unappreciated.”

We Work for Health is a grassroots initiative focused on improving America’s health care system. Carper, a UD alumnus, was recognized because he “has long supported key legislative issues impacting the biotech industry, most recently including the America Invents Act, demonstrating his commitment to protecting jobs in Delaware,” according to a press release about the event.

Friday’s program emphasized Carper’s “leadership in the Senate on biopharmaceuticals and health care to foster economic growth through innovation,” said the release.

Over 80 representatives from industry, the University of Delaware, the Alzheimer’s Association of Delaware and other special interest groups, Delaware State University and Delaware Technology Park were in attendance.

Bob Dayton, president of Delaware Bio, commented on Carper’s tenacity and persistence in creating the Delaware Technology Park, where the event was held. “What better place to recognize Sen. Carper for supporting innovation than on Innovation Way at DBI.”

“You’re a champion of many things,” commented Mark Barteau, UD senior vice provost for research and strategic initiatives. “UD is grateful for your continued support in many areas like our clean energy initiatives, life science research at DBI and defense research through the Center for Composite Materials. You have been with us every step of the way.”

Continuing the sentiment was Kelvin Lee, director of DBI and Gore Professor of Chemical Engineering. “A lot of credit for the innovative science happening in Delaware goes to Sen. Carper, and is still fueled by his dedication.”

Mike Bowman, chairman and president of Delaware Technology Park, recognized how the actions of the senator have led to jobs — even roads — to spur Delaware innovation. “Todays honor represents only a sampling of the wonderful things Sen. Carper has done. Through his leadership, over 16,000 jobs have been created since 1998, not to mention the 54 companies that are here in Tech Park today that have spun out 30 more all because he helped us build the road in.”

Carper dedicated his accomplishments to the lessons he was taught by his parents as a child, saying, “My parents taught me right from wrong and how to figure out the right thing to do — which is not necessarily the easiest thing to do. They also stressed using common sense, and they let me figure out what that meant on my own.”

He also shared with the audience his favorite part of being a senator: “One of the things I love most about my job is job creation and job preservation, and we’re good at that in Delaware. Growing up as a Navy commanding officer, I learned that I could accomplish anything as long as I never gave up.”

Article by Laura Crozier, Photo by Evan Krape