I hope you all had a very enjoyable Holiday Season and are ready for the New Year.
The Executive Board met on January 4thand made a number of decisions:
2. The Newsletter and Website Committees were combined to form the new Communications Committee, which will be co-chaired by Randy Smith and Paul Bruinsma.
3. John Schindler volunteered to be the new Public Relations Committee Chair and was so appointed by the Board.
4. All other Committee Chair positions shown on the Executive Board Rooster on the last page of this Newsletter were appointed by the Board. Thanks to all the Board Members for willing to serve on the Board!!!!! We still have two major openings that need to be filled. They are the Chair-Elect and Education Committee Chair positions. Please let me know if you would like to volunteer for one of these positions or would like to nominate someone to one of these positions.
Randy Smith updated the Board on the new website, which has been simplified and made more user friendly. Thank you Randy!!!!
Be sure to join us for our first Monthly Meeting on January 26th. David Brown will be describing his "Investigations with Light and Sustainable Energy Resources" (iLASER) Program at Southwestern College. See the December 5th issue of C&EN for further details as well as additional information on our website.
Project iLASER:
Engaging the Public in IYC 2011
David R. Brown, Ph.D.
Professor of Chemistry
Southwestern College, Chula Vista, CA
DATE: Thursday, January 26, 2012
TIME: 6:00 PM Social Hour, Light Dinner
7:00 PM Lecture
PLACE:
Pfizer, CB2-1110, 10770 Science Center Drive,
San Diego, CA
RESERVATIONS: By Monday, January 23, 2012
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
David Brown joined the full-time faculty in the Department of Chemistry at Southwestern College in 1996. He received a B.A. in Chemistry from the Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, earned a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and undertook postdoctoral research at UC San Diego. David was awarded the Award for Incorporating Sustainability into Chemistry Education from the American Chemical Society Committee on Environmental Improvement for 2012 and the Stanley C. Israel Award for Advancing Diversity in the Chemical Sciences from the American Chemical Society Western Region in 2007.
ABOUT THE LECTURE:
As an endeavor to celebrate the International Year of Chemistry 2011, David led a project in public science outreach, Project iLASER (investigations with Light And Sustainable EnergyResources), with a central theme of harnessing the sun as a source of sustainable energy to power the planet. Project iLASER included an extensive road trip to work with children living along the 2,000 mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border from the Pacific Ocean bordering California to the Gulf of Mexico on the Texas border. He visited elementary schools and Boys & Girls Clubs in border cities, where Hispanic communities are concentrated. The project was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Chemistry and Informal Science Education program. For more information please see http://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i49/Solar-Road-Trip.html
CHAL PROGRAM AT THE NATIONAL ACS MEETING IN SAN DIEGO
SDACS LAW COMMITTEE EVENT
TITLE: "Strategies for Designing Around Chemical Patents"
TOPICS:
1. Identifying blocking patents: the FTO
2. Rules of claim construction relevant to chemistry
3. The boundary between infringement and non- infringement in the chemical arts
4. Application of the Doctrine of Equivalents in the Chemical Arts
5. Non-infringement opinions
SPEAKERS:
1. Edward Robinson, DLA Piper LLP (US)
2. Donald Lewis, Lewis Kohn & Fitzwilliam, LLP
3. David Wallace (Consultant)
DATE: March 28, 2012
TIME: 2:00 PM to 4:30 PM
LOCATION: San Diego Convention Center, Room: TBA
111 W. Harbor Drive, San Diego, CA 92101
INFORMATION: Don Lewis at dlewis@lewiskohn.com
THE INCUBATION OF INNOVATION:
CREATING A CAPITAL-EFFICIENT ECOSYSTEM FOR SUCCESS
Melinda Richter
Founder & CEO, Prescience International
DATE: Wednesday, February 22, 2012
TIME: 6:00 PM Social Hour, Light Dinner
7:00 PM Lecture
PLACE: Town Hall Room,
Janssen Research & Development
3210 Merryfield Row, San Diego
RESERVATIONS: By Friday, February 17, 2012
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
With over 15 years of global experience in creating, financing and managing innovative companies in emerging and convergence technologies, Melinda Richter specializes in accelerating the development of products-to-market, andcompanies-to-investment. She is the founder and CEO of Prescience International, a full-scale management firm which focuses on accelerating the commercialization of science and technology. For Janssen Labs in San Diego, she guides an operations management team to enable innovative life sciences companies to rapidly deliver better solutions to the healthcare challenges faced today. In addition to Janssen Labs, the Prescience innovation center portfolio includes the San Jose BioCenter and the Environmental Business Cluster (EBC). Under her leadership, the San Jose BioCenter was named one of the best life science incubators in the U.S. by CNN, honored by the National Business Incubation Association with its 2009 Incubator of the Year Award and granted the Harvard’s Bright Ideas Award. The EBC, one of the first cleantech incubators ever to be established in the U.S., was ranked as a "Top 10 Incubators Changing the World" by Forbes.com, one of the “Top 10 Start Up Incubators to Watch” by Inc.com, named by Popular Science Magazine as one of three Places Where Inventors Are Born, and also ranked as a top incubator by CNN. Richter has served on the governing board of the National Business Incubation Association and currently sits on boards of University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business Center for Executive Education BioExec Institute, the San Jose State University's Masters of Biotechnology Program and UC San Francisco's School of Dentistry. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and an M.B.A. from INSEAD in France.
ABOUT THE LECTURE:
Barriers to discovery and development faced by innovative startup companies prevents great science from leaving the bench and moving to the marketplace. Not the least of these barriers is the flow of capital that is needed to continue necessary R&D. In order for innovation to happen, it must have the right capital-efficient environment in which scientists and researchers are able to concentrate on their discoveries. Today’s market realities require an unconventional ecosystem for them to explore game-changing ideas and move those to success. Addressing the theme, "The Incubation of Innovation," Richter will share with ACS her successes in developing a new lab model that boosts success rates for early stage companies and allows them to conserve resources to put their money to work in an optimized, capital-efficient environment.