Beginning this fall, Clarion University hopes to encourage the development of biotech businesses in the region around its main campus, which is located some 90 miles northeast of Pittsburgh and 100 miles southeast of Erie.
Thanks to a $1.2 million gift from a retired professor of accounting and a $130,000 Keystone Innovation Starter Kit from the Pennsylvania Department of Community & Economic Development, the university can aim for a September opening of the Gregory Barnes Center for Biotechnology Business Development. The center is one of two significant capital investments made possible by the gift from Gregory Barnes, who made the most of a professor’s salary through more than a quarter century of personal investing inspired by his father’s experience in an investment club.
“I wanted to donate now while I have the ability to do it,” said Barnes, whose contribution will also fund the university’s construction of the new Bradford George Carmack Barnes residence hall named in honor of Barnes’ deceased son and scheduled to open in August at its Venango campus. “I’m not here to inspire anyone.”
With the Barnes gift, Clarion competed for the state grant, which was awarded last month and be used to underwrite a research laboratory dedicated to applied nanotechnology.
“Nanotechnology, and specifically nanodiamonds, represents unlimited potential with commercial applications of lubrication, coatings, composites, drug delivery and medical imaging,” Robert Huemmrich, director of the biocenter, says.
Part of a mixed use development of the Clarion Trinity Development Co., known as Trinity Point and located several miles west of the main campus in Clarion, the Barnes Center will occupy about 20,000 square feet of LEED Silver accredited space that will be expanded as demand requires to some 80,000 square feet, according to Dan Delisio, an architect with the firm Next Architecture. Accessible from Interstate 80, the structure is designed to react to the motion of the highway “as well as the constant momentum of the tenants in growing and developing new technologies,” Delisio says.
Source: Clarion University, Next Architecture, Dan Delisio
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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