SSTI Digest

The Advanced Technology Program (ATP) has announced 40 awards potentially totaling $101.6 million in ATP funding matched by an industry cost-share of $92 million if carried through to completion. These awards were selected from proposals submitted to 2002 competition.

Managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, ATP provides cost-shared funding to industry-led teams which can include non-profits and universities to help advance particularly challenging, high-risk research and development projects that have the potential to spark important, broad-based economic or social benefits for the U.S. The program supports projects that industry cannot fully fund on its own because of significant technical risks.

Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Townsend recently announced the release of Founders of Maryland Bioscience and Medical Instrument Companies, a report on the career pathways taken by founders of biotechnology companies in Maryland.

Funded by the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO) and the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED), the report is part of the Bioscience Dialogue, a collaborative effort within the state's biotechnology industry to identify issues of importance to its growth. The $30,000 report traces the background of 276 company founders in Maryland and highlights these findings in bio-entrepreneurship:

Correction: Lara Vande Walle is the director of membership and business development for the Maryland Technology Council, not Maryland's TEDCO as was previously reported.

The Maryland Technology Development Corp. (TEDCO) has hired Lara Vande Walle to serve as director of membership and business development.

Forty-four research universities in 28 states and the District of Columbia will receive $80 million from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to help address the challenges of the rapidly changing and increasingly interdisciplinary nature of undergraduate biology education. The grants will support programs that encourage graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to hone their teaching skills in undergraduate courses.

Other programs will bring emerging scientific disciplines such as genomics and computational biology into the undergraduate curriculum and encourage minorities to pursue careers in science.

The four-year grants range in size from $1.2 million to $2.2 million each. A panel of scientists and educators reviewed proposals from 189 institutions.

A study released by the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University in Boston is one of the more recent efforts to examine all aspects of U.S. states and their economies. Entitled State Competitiveness Report 2001, the study defines competitiveness as the ability to ensure and sustain a high level of per capita income and its continued growth.

The BHI report combines more than three dozen variables into nine subindexes: government and fiscal policy, institutions, infrastructure, human resources, technology, finance, openness, domestic competition and environmental policy. Using the nine subindexes, each of which represents an element of competitiveness, the authors made an overall index and ranked the states according to their overall competitiveness.

Among the study's key findings are:

Because knowledge-based services can be supplied anywhere across the world due to increased international investment in IT infrastructure, future U.S. competitiveness hinges on diversification and broadening of the technology-based manufacturing sector, according to NIST Senior Economist George Tassey. Tassey's lastest report, R&D and Long-Term Competitiveness: Manufacturing's Central Role in a Knowledge-based Economy, lays out the critical role manufacturing and manufacturing R&D plays in the U.S. economy, presents the dire forecast for low-R&D intensive manufacturers, and presents a framework for analyzing federal R&D investment strategies consistent with a national innovation system. Tassey also argues that the zeal or enthusiasm for information technology that dominated policy discussion during the past few years and overshadowed and "induced and unbalanced perspective" on the appropriate strategies to secure economic competitiveness.

President Bush has nominated Elias Zerhouni, executive vice dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as the new director of the National Institutes of Health.

The Maryland Technology Development Corp. (TEDCO) and the Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED) recently presented the first part of a two-phase study by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies entitled The Genealogy of Maryland Entrepreneurs. Phillip Singerman, executive director of TEDCO, and David S. Iannucci, Maryland Secretary of DBED, provided the information Feb. 4 during the fifth annual State of Technology in Maryland Summit in Annapolis. Highlights of the first phase of the study reveal the following about the history of Maryland businesses:

The Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO) kicked off the new year with a new $330,000 program to support Maryland companies wishing to develop technology-based products and/or services in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University (JHU), Morgan State University (MSU) or federal laboratories in Maryland. The Maryland Technology Transfer Fund (MTTF) will award non-equity investments of up to $50,000 per project.

The program supports company technology development projects that transfer technology from JHU, MSU or a federal laboratory in Maryland to the commercial sector and the development of technology-based products and/or services for future government uses. The Fund, made possible by a grant from the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED), is also providing $100,000 to JHU and MSU to develop innovative ways to partner with industry.

The Maryland Technology Development Corp. (TEDCO), RESI (a regional economic studies institute at Towson University), and the Maryland Business Incubation Association (MBIA) presented on Thursday the results of the Maryland Incubator Impact Study — a first-of-its-kind study for the state by measuring the economic impact of Maryland's six public- and university-related high-tech business incubators on the state's economy.  Maryland's incubators are a significant economic boon to the state of Maryland, the study shows, estimating that incubator tenants and graduates generate between $184 and $530 million in gross state product and between $31 and $96 million in taxes annually.  The study also reveals the following: 

The Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC) has announced that James Thurston has joined the ITIC team as Director of Technology Policy. Mr. Thurston has worked for NIST's Manufacturing Extension Partnership for several years.