March 2007: Feature story
The “three amigos” in the Kelley Engineering
Center at Oregon State University. From left: Mas
Subramanian, Milton Harris professor of materials science
at OSU; Doug Keszler, OSU professor of inorganic chemistry;
and David Johnson, U of O professor of chemistry.
Photo by Jon Meyers.
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The power of three
A trio of world-class scientists embodies the strength of
collaboration and forges stronger links to the business world.
By Christina
Williams
When Mas Subramanian, Dave Johnson and Doug Keszler get
together, they’re as likely to talk about techniques for
new ways to manipulate unfathomably tiny nanomaterials as they
are to chat about their families or the weather.
This trio of solid-state chemists is such a clubby bunch that
it even has a catchy nickname: the three amigos.
But they also have impressive credentials, international
reputations and research that bring in millions in grant money
and look sexy to investors who see business potential in their
inventions. And like the Oregon Nanoscience and
Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI) that claims them as member
researchers, they’re an example of why it’s
imperative that Oregon universities work together to raise the
national profile of the state’s universities and the
research that’s done here.
Even though Johnson’s office is on the University of
Oregon campus in Eugene and Subramanian and Keszler hail from
Oregon State, they’re so chummy — Keszler and
Johnson even co-manage an internship program for graduate
students from both universities — you’d never
know they didn’t wear the same school colors.
And from the perspective of people like David Chen, ubiquitous
economic development strategist, regular gadfly to academia and
chairman of ONAMI, they’re definitely on the same team:
Oregon’s.
“These guys are not up-and-coming,” says Chen,
partner with OVP Venture Partners and chairman of the Oregon
Innovation Council. “They are at the top of their
games.”
In the world of academic research, seniority counts for a lot.
The pecking order for research prowess is measured largely by
the grants pulled down — it’s hard to invent
without money and research grants from organizations such as
the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of
Health are the source of much of that money. And, Chen says,
the boards behind those groups are still old-boy networks.
“That’s what we’re so damn excited about
with Mas,” Chen says. “We’ve been lacking
seniority with that peer-review system, the
establishment.”
When Mas Subramanian, an affable, quick-talking 50-year-old
scientist, joined the staff at Oregon State last May, it was an
instant boost in stature for both the school and the state.
Subramanian came from the labs of Wilm-ington, Del.-based
DuPont, where he worked for 21 years, putting his name on 51
patents for the company. He’s known worldwide for his
work in high-temperature superconductivity, thermoelectrics and
developing greener chemical processes.
He’s not yet supervising students or teaching classes,
but already Subramanian has the look of a harried professor.
He’s spending long hours writing grant proposals,
overseeing the outfitting of a new lab and setting up the OSU
Materials Institute, which will coordinate research efforts
between departments on campus in areas such as electronics and
biomaterials. A formal institute, he says, will be more visible
to the outside world.
OSU is counting on Subramanian both to raise the
school’s profile and bring in more research money.
U of O’s Dave Johnson, on the other hand, lobbied
heavily for Subramanian to pick Oregon among his many academic
job possibilities for one main reason: He’s counting on
Subramanian to help make Oregon the best place in the world to
study materials chemistry.
THE WORLD OF TOP-FLIGHT SOLID-STATE CHEMISTS is a cozy one. A
little more than 20 years ago, Johnson was on the hiring
committee for DuPont when they brought on a newly minted Ph.D.
named Mas Subramanian. Later, Johnson (whose native Oregonian
wife, a fellow scientist, was pushing for a move back home)
applied for a job at Oregon State — the one OSU hired
Doug Keszler to fill. Johnson landed at U of O in 1986. In the
last 20 years, Keszler and Johnson have each brought in $11
million to their respective institutions in the form of
research grants.
“When Doug said ‘jump’ to get Mas to come
here, I said ‘how high?’” Johnson says.
“It didn’t matter that he was coming to
OSU.”
Johnson, who is 50, is a vocal proponent of collaboration
between the universities. “We get so little money from
the state of Oregon,” he says. “Why fight over the
crumbs?”
Collaboration is the whole idea behind something Johnson
founded called the Center for Advanced Materials
Characterization in Oregon (CAMCOR for short), a kind of
high-tech extension service. Through CAMCOR, Johnson makes sure
the nano equipment the university has is available to any
researcher willing to make the drive to use it — that
includes both academicians and scientists from Oregon
companies.
Visit Johnson in Eugene and he’ll walk you over to a
chain link fence to look at a construction excavation
that’s just a stone’s throw from his office and
tell you how engineers used an accelerometer to measure
vibrations to find the most stable ground on campus.
What’s now a 19-foot hole in the ground soon will be the
new subterranean home for an ONAMI research center including
semiconductor, photolithography, nanofabrication and bio-optics
labs along with the 20 high-tech instruments and ultra
high-powered microscopes belonging to CAMCOR. The new facility
(named the Lorry I. Lokey Laboratories after the founder of
Business Wire who gave generously to the project) will also
include space for companies to use on an ongoing basis.
Johnson compares the new labs, which should be up and running
by the end of the year, to the Duck football team’s
storied $3 million locker room — it’s one more tool
the university can use to recruit students and faculty as well
as forge closer and more fruitful relationships with industry
partners.
For Johnson and his colleagues over at OSU, ONAMI is an
important connector between the business world and their own.
“It’s got everyone’s attention,”
Johnson says.
Subramanian sees ONAMI as a resource, a depository of
expertise and a conduit between academic discovery and the
marketplace. “It’s not easy to penetrate
industry,” Subramanian says. “It may look easy, but
it’s not.”
BUT ACADEMIA AND INDUSTRY ARE GROWING ever closer. both in
Oregon and across the country, as their symbiotic relationship
becomes more and more important.
The universities need businesses to employ their graduates,
give their students real-world experience and act as partner
— and sometimes rich-uncle backer — in research
pursuits. As for industry, businesses large and small are more
and more often treating university labs as their own R&D
facilities.
It’s a shift that Subramanian witnessed firsthand during
the second half of his tenure at DuPont as he watched the
company look outward more and more for its research advances,
getting intellectual property by either acquiring startups or
licensing technology from the universities.
“The great industry research labs are
disappearing,” he says. “More and more the attitude
is: What can the university do for us?”
Coming from the industry side of the equation, Subramanian is
getting used to the somewhat sluggish pace of academia just as
he is small-town life in Corvallis and overly careful Oregon
drivers.
While he speaks with relish about the new opportunity he has
to use academic freedom to pursue whatever research most
interests him, Subramanian won’t ever stop thinking about
the market for his inventions. “Research must focus on
societal needs,” he says. “That’s the only
way you can tell the world that research has value.”
He doesn’t have to convince Doug Keszler of that. Almost
boyish and very unassuming, you wouldn’t peg 49-year-old
Keszler as the cunning entrepreneur that he is. His side
company, Brilliant Technologies, has developed a phosphor
security tag that offshore manufacturers of removable disks use
to verify their products.
“I’ve never had to advertise,” says Keszler.
“I’ve formed relationships through professional
conferences and organizations contacting me through my website.
We’re in the security phosphor business, so I’ve
wanted to maintain a low profile.”
He also acts as an adviser to Deep Photonics, a Corvallis
company that makes lasers for the semiconductor industry using
a material that Keszler helped develop. He says there are more
startups to come.
Keszler has seen some improvement in the university’s
handling of intellectual property. He describes the first
patent he filed with the school in 1994, for a material called
cesium lithium borate.
“In ’94 this place wasn’t too swift in
technology transfer,” Keszler says. “They sat on it
for a year.” Meanwhile a group in Japan filed a similar
patent, got it, and OSU lost out. “It would have been
pretty valuable for the university.”
Technology transfer — the process of licensing
university technology to another company or spinning it out as
a startup — is an area where the dance between industry
and academia can become clumsy.
Johnson speaks in glowing terms about the U of O tech transfer
office, through which he’s been involved with three
patents and ongoing discussions, but he says the laws in Oregon
hamstring the university’s ability to partner with
private industry because of questions about who owns the
intellectual property of new discoveries.
One of the initiatives being pushed in the Legislature by the
governor-appointed Oregon Innovation Council would change the
laws to create a more efficient tech-transfer process.
Skip Rung, director of ONAMI, says his organization keeps out
of intellectual property matters but says the streamlining of
tech transfer is an important initiative for Oregon to truly
take advantage of the collective expertise of scientists like
the three amigos.
“They’re as smart as anyone, but they run into
barriers,” Rung says. ONAMI’s raison d’etre
is to shrink those barriers down to a more manageable size and
raise the profile of superstar research — the work of
Keszler and Johnson and the reputation of Subramanian is
arguably better known outside of Oregon than it is here.
It’s time for a change. Says Rung: “The idea of
research being all about knowledge and being disinterested in
business is outdated.”
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