ROCKVILLE, Md.--As support for UMBI's technology is speeding up, the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute will inaugurate its second president with a series of free public events on November 9-10, including a special symposium.
Microbiologist and ecologist Jennie Hunter-Cevera, Ph.D., brings over 20 years of experience in business-academic relations, at a time when international interest is running high to market UMBI's technologies, including preventative AIDS vaccines, urban fish farming methods, poultry vaccines and genomic protein data for advanced drug design.
"Jennie Hunter-Cevera's wealth of knowledge and expertise will help Maryland maintain its stance as a premier center of innovation and growth in the biotech industry," says Maryland Governor Parris N. Glendening.
Maryland is generally recognized as having the nation's third largest biotechnology sector and rapidly expanding, with $1.17 billion investments in private companies, more than 42,000 employees and about 250 companies. (source: non-profit MdBio Inc.). UMBI, with five research and education centers in the Baltimore/Washington corridor, operates on a 1985 state mandate to stimulate economic development in biotechnology.
"I am very proud to say we are now entering a second phase of UMBI's growth, a technology transfer phase," says Hunter-Cevera. "It is very exciting that, after 15 years of solid research results, we are beginning to focus more resources and energy on fulfilling our mandate."Hunter-Cevera replaces founding president Rita R. Colwell, Ph.D.,
who left UMBI to become director of the National Science Foundation. Colwell will speak at Hunter-Cevera's inauguration along with several other national science and political leaders.
Hunter-Cevera was most recently head of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology and director of the Department of Environmental Biology and iochemistry for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), University of C
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Contact: Steve Berberich
berberic@umbi.umd.edu
410-385-6315
University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute
29-Oct-2000