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byline: Beth JoJack

Indoor salmon farm travels upstream

An indoor fish farm located in Southwest Virginia, an idea born nearly a decade ago, is slowly swimming its way closer to reality.

Work on water infrastructure improvements, including a new water line and sewage lift station, to support the Pure Salmon facility that will straddle Tazewell and Russell counties could begin as early as March 2023, according to Tazewell County Administrator Eric Young.

Pure Salmon, a global Atlantic salmon farming and processing business headquartered in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and backed by Singapore-based private equity firm 8F Asset Management Pte. Ltd., plans to invest about $228 million in the aquaculture facility, which will sit on about 200 acres and employ around 200 people, according to a company website.

The Virginia Pure Salmon facility could use up to 400,000 gallons of water a day, according to Young. Without upgrades to the water system, he says, the county wouldn’t be able to meet those needs. 

The improvements are expected to cost about $10 million, Young says. In August, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration announced the county will receive a $4.3 million grant to help pay for the project. The federal Appalachian Regional Commission will add another $1 million to the kitty. “We’ve got a few more grant applications in that we’re expecting to go favorably,” Young says.

Any costs not covered by grants will be amortized in Pure Salmon’s future water and sewer bills.

Additionally, teams from Appalachian Power are planning upgrades to support Pure Salmon. The utility will build about two miles of electric lines as well as a new substation near the aquaculture facility. Construction is slated to begin in early 2023 and conclude by the end of 2024.

A consultant to the project says Pure Salmon isn’t providing construction updates. However, according to its website, site preparation began in the fall of 2021 with construction expected to be complete by the end of 2023. Pure Salmon did not respond to questions about whether it could start operations before Appalachian Power completes its work.

Once the facility is built, it will still take about 22 months for roe to become mature salmon, Young cautions.

“If you’re talking about when does the first fish come out in a nice cellophane wrapper … you’re probably looking at the end of 2025,” he says. 

100 people to meet in 2023

It’s time to set your social calendar for 2023, and here are some Virginians you’ll want to introduce yourself to — Virginia Business’ fourth annual list of 100 people to meet in the new year.

Hailing from all parts of the state and representing a variety of industries and nonprofits, this year’s cohort includes Nightingale Ice Cream’s co-founders in Richmond, a tunnel boring machine engineer working on the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, the publisher of The Rockbridge Advocate newspaper in Lexington and a Northrop Grumman exec heading up the team building the crew module for NASA’s next manned lunar mission. Oh, and don’t forget about the internet pioneer who lives on a sheep farm in Giles County. They all have interesting stories and are making a difference in the commonwealth.

And remember: Whether you’re meeting remotely or in person, it’s always a nice icebreaker to say, “I saw you in Virginia Business.”

Angels

Builders

Educators

Go-Getters

Hosts

Impact Makers

Innovators

New Folks

Public Faces

Rainmakers

Branch builds career pipeline for girls

Women made up about 11% of the construction workforce in 2021, but that doesn’t mean they were all on site wearing a hard hat.

That percentage includes women in office and administrative roles, positions more traditionally filled by females, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

And so, many recruiters see women as an untapped resource for the construction industry, which expects to lose a whopping 41% of its workers to retirement by 2031, according to the National Center for Construction Education and Research.

On Oct. 22, Roanoke construction firm The Branch Group hosted its inaugural G.I.R.L. (Girls in Real Life) Construction Experience, an event designed to expose girls to opportunities in the construction industry, with an emphasis on careers as skilled tradespeople and in science, technology, engineering and math professions.

“It’s not a career that’s just for men,” stresses Aisha Johnson, Branch’s economic inclusion, diversity and equal employment opportunity specialist. “Women can have successful careers in construction.”

More than 100 girls and teens ages 5 to 18 turned out for the 4-hour experience, during which they participated in activities ranging from riding in a boom lift to taking a virtual reality tour of a construction site to building a paper bridge.

“We focused on activities related to construction site work since fewer women enter those positions in construction,” explains Johnson. 

Nikki Williams, CEO of Girl Scouts of Virginia Skyline, which helped organize the event, points out that by the time girls are in 11th grade, fewer than 12% will consider a career in a STEM field.

“And we truly believe it’s all about access,” Williams says, “so this event was wonderful because it gave girls access to see exactly all the different types of activities and careers that they could pursue in construction that have a STEM component to them and gave them a chance to do it hands-on.”

Aubrie Taylor, a third-grader from Vinton, particularly enjoyed flying a drone and learning how drones are used to survey construction sites. “That was really fun,” she says.

Aubrie’s mother, Tamara Taylor, signed her daughter up for the construction experience because she wanted to open her eyes to the many career opportunities she has. “With construction itself, it’s not something that you see women in the field doing every single day,” she says.  

A stitch in time

At the end of 2020, Eastern Virginia Medical School firmly rejected a study recommending that the medical school merge to become part of Old Dominion University.

But time passes, minds change, and sometimes there’s turnover at the top. 

In August 2021, Dr. Richard Homan, who’d led EVMS for nearly a decade, retired. By December, Dr. Alfred Abuhamad, then the medical school’s interim president, signed an agreement with ODU’s new president, Brian Hemphill, and Howard Kern, then president and CEO of Sentara Healthcare, pledging “to explore ways closer alignment or affiliation could enhance their collaborative efforts to strengthen educational research and health care outcomes in Hampton Roads.”

And this summer, ODU hired Dr. Alicia Monroe as chief integration officer and senior adviser to Hemphill, a two-year position to establish an academic health sciences center with EVMS and Sentara Healthcare. In July, Hemphill wrote a letter to ODU’s faculty and staff stating that the university’s goal is “to develop a comprehensive plan to integrate ODU and EVMS in 2023.”

Even so, school officials weren’t quite ready to say the two institutions are merging.

In response to questions from Virginia Business, the two schools released a joint statement stating it was premature to respond to the question, “Is EVMS becoming an arm of ODU?”

Aubrey Layne, Sentara’s senior corporate vice president and chief of staff, didn’t share that hesitation, however.

“EVMS is affiliating or actually combining with Old Dominion as part of their plan to become a sustainable medical school,” he said during an August interview.

To make the partnership official, Virginia’s General Assembly would have to give the OK, according to both EVMS spokesperson Vincent Rhodes and Layne, who added that he, along with officials from the two schools, met with Gov. Glenn Youngkin in August about the plan.

A spokesperson from the governor’s office confirmed that Youngkin “had a meeting with the appropriate partners to gather additional information on the collaboration between the entities,” without providing more detail.

“I think the political will is there,” Layne says. 

A joint effort

Founded in 1973 as a public institution not affiliated with an undergraduate university, EVMS took shape after community leaders became alarmed about a physician shortage in the region.

“We grew out of the community, and collaboration is in our genes,” says C. Donald Combs, EVMS vice president and dean of the School of Health Professions. 

Close cooperation between Sentara and EVMS hasn’t always come naturally, though. In 2020 and 2021, the medical school paid Vienna-based public relations firm Tigercomm $497,000 for crisis communications and community support work in what Tigercomm President Mike Casey has said was a bid to avoid a potential EVMS-ODU-Sentara merger “being pushed by Sentara” at the time. Tigercomm’s work for EVMS came under media scrutiny in 2021 in a series of articles focusing on the fact that Casey had co-founded in 2011 an investigative watchdog blog, Checks & Balances Project, that had been publishing a series of articles critical of Sentara since late 2020. EVMS and Tigercomm were adamant that they didn’t pay C&BP for its coverage of Sentara, and Casey notes that he does not have “ownership or control” of C&BP or its content.

So, how did Sentara and EVMS go from that awkward place to embarking on a partnership with ODU?

“A lot of it has to do with a change in leadership,” Layne says. Aside from Abuhamad, who became EVMS’ permanent president, provost and medical school dean in June, Hemphill became ODU’s ninth president in July 2021, succeeding John Broderick. At Sentara, Kern retired at the end of August, with Dennis Matheis becoming president and CEO in September.

Hemphill, who served as Radford University’s president for five years, came to Norfolk after overseeing the 2019 merger between the Jefferson College of Health Sciences and Carilion Clinic to create Radford University Carilion, which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in health sciences.

In his June letter, Hemphill wrote, “Although much work remains ahead, the vision is clear. ODU and EVMS face an important moment with the promising potential to achieve more through a full integration, which is both impactful and inspiring.”

Sentara, ODU and EVMS officials also note that collaboration will also help improve health care for Hampton Roads residents.

Bottom line

In terms of finances, Sentara makes the argument that EVMS needs to partner with a public university — like Virginia Tech’s partnership with Carilion Clinic to create the VTC School of Medicine — to receive “state funding parity with other Virginia schools” and be better positioned to raise philanthropic dollars. 

For fiscal year 2021, EVMS had an annual budget of about $278 million. About $31 million of that came from the state government. Sentara gives more than $60 million to the school for education and training each year, according to Layne. In March, Sentara also donated $6 million to EVMS, ODU and Norfolk State University to develop the ONE School of Public Health, which will be Virginia’s first such institution.

“The issue here has to deal with additional funding, so that the EVMS is a sustainable organization into the future,” Layne says.

Underlying the entire merger discussion is the severe staffing shortage affecting the health care field.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported this year that about 18% of Virginia hospitals are “critically understaffed,” a situation Virginia state Sen. Jen Kiggans, R-Virginia Beach, is familiar with as a nurse practitioner. 

“We’ve been in a shortage of primary care providers for a while,” she says. “And then, on top of that, is our mental health care provider workforce challenges.”

Kiggans says a merger between EVMS and ODU would be “instrumental” in bolstering the region’s health care workforce pipeline. “It keeps us competitive with places like Charlottesville and U.Va. and even Richmond and VCU.”

By joining forces, Sentara, EVMS and ODU could share staff members and health science libraries, as well as bolster clinical opportunities for students, she adds. “None of these individual institutions of learning can survive independently.”

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected and updated to clarify the authorship of a blog that published stories about Sentara Healthcare. The Sentara stories were published on the blog Checks & Balances Project, which was co-founded by Mike Casey, the president of public relations firm Tigercomm, but Casey has said he doesn’t own or control C&BP or its content; C&BP is a client of Tigercomm.

Theater renovations draw downtown visitors

Before her August performance at Marion’s historic Lincoln Theatre, country singer Lorrie Morgan took an afternoon stroll downtown, stopping at shops and the local farmers market, according to Tracy Thompson, the theater’s director.

Drawing visitors — famous and otherwise — to downtown Marion was the goal back in 2004 when the community raised more than $1.8 million to renovate the Lincoln, which was initially built in 1929 as a movie theater.

Pennington Gap had a similar goal in mind in 2013 when it reopened its Lee Theatre, which dates to 1947 and, like the Lincoln, closed during the 1970s. Now, organizers hope to drive economic development in Wytheville with the soon-to-reopen Millwald Theatre.

Jeff Potts, who came on board as executive director of Millwald Theatre Inc. earlier this year, hopes to finish the venue’s $4.8 million renovation and expansion in time to stage its opening events around Thanksgiving or in early December. “Definitely sometime this year,” he says.

On a busy night, he expects the Millwald to draw 500 visitors downtown.

“They’re going to come early and stay late in downtown Wytheville,” Potts says. “And that, ultimately, is the point of why we’re doing this. It’s not just to save the building, and not just to create a cultural gathering spot. It’s to make money and to spread that throughout our community.”

That’s what’s happened with the Lee Theatre, according to Keith Harless, town manager of Pennington Gap, which has 1,922 residents. The venue hosts events about four times a month.

“When you have an average of 300 people that come to our little downtown, that’s a huge impact for a town of our size,” he says.

While the Lee Theatre screens movies, Marion’s Lincoln Theatre has, until now, stuck to live events. Thornton hopes that will soon change. In June, Gov. Glenn Youngkin recommended that the Lincoln Theatre receive a $69,025 grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal economic development agency, to purchase equipment to allow the theater to digitally project movies.

The Millwald will also screen films, but Thompson isn’t worried about competition. “The more venues, the more performance opportunities there are in the region, the better everyone is going to do,” she says. “Southwest Virginia, hopefully, will become a really strong arts destination.”

Agriculture conference headed for Danville

A new conference for the controlled environment agriculture (CEA) industry will debut Oct. 25 at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research (IALR) in Danville.

One goal behind the event, dubbed CEA Summit East, is “highlighting some of the CEA growth that’s happening in Virginia — and particularly in Southern Virginia,” according to organizer Kaylee South.

Sure to be a topic of discussion at the conference: New Jersey-based AeroFarms, which this year opened a 138,670-square-foot, $53 million vertical farm in Pittsylvania County. Located in Cane Creek Centre, a joint industrial park owned by the city of Danville and Pittsylvania County, the AeroFarms facility is expected to create more than 150 jobs and has been promoted as the world’s largest indoor vertical farm of its kind. Roger Buelow, chief technology officer for AeroFarms, is the keynote speaker for CEA Summit East.

The conference will be jointly run by the Controlled Environment Agriculture Innovation Center — a joint Virginia Tech-IALR center located on the IALR campus — and Indoor Ag-Con, a national CEA trade show and conference.

Additionally, organizers are hopeful the conference will spur more local economic development by encouraging networking between CEA farmers and researchers in the Eastern U.S. as well as economic development officials and real estate developers. 

“At the highest levels in the state, they’re interested in CEA,” says Scott Lowman, vice president of applied research at IALR.  “So, we feel like we’re doing our part to help bring everybody together.”

South, one of the conference’s organizers, is an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s School of Plant and Environmental Sciences but is based at the Controlled Environment Agriculture Innovation Center in Danville. She expects the conference to attract about 250 attendees.

“I’m really excited to just meet people in the industry and have the chance to bring together industry and academia people,” she says.

Controlled environment agriculture refers to “growing agricultural products within enclosed environments where you’re regulating the environment for the specific agricultural products that you’re producing,” explains South.

It can be as simple as using hoop houses (hoops positioned over crops and covered by plastic) or as sophisticated as vertical farms, where plants are grown indoors, stacked vertically on shelves, improving food safety and requiring less water and pesticide.

Founded in 2002 as an economic development engine for Southern Virginia, the IALR houses research initiatives and provides workforce training and conference facilities.  

A stitch in time: ODU, EVMS eye potential merger

At the end of 2020, Eastern Virginia Medical School firmly rejected a study recommending that the medical school merge to become part of Old Dominion University.

But time passes, minds change, and sometimes there’s turnover at the top.

In August 2021, Dr. Richard Homan, who’d led EVMS for nearly a decade, retired. By December, Dr. Alfred Abuhamad, then the medical school’s interim president, signed an agreement with ODU’s new president, Brian Hemphill, and Howard Kern, then president and CEO of Sentara Healthcare, pledging “to explore ways closer alignment or affiliation could enhance their collaborative efforts to strengthen educational research and health care outcomes in Hampton Roads.”

And this summer, ODU hired Dr. Alicia Monroe as chief integration officer and senior adviser to Hemphill, a two-year position to establish an academic health sciences center with EVMS and Sentara Healthcare. In July, Hemphill wrote a letter to ODU’s faculty and staff stating that the university’s goal is “to develop a comprehensive plan to integrate ODU and EVMS in 2023.”

Even so, school officials weren’t quite ready to say the two institutions are merging.

In response to questions from Virginia Business, the two schools released a joint statement stating it was premature to respond to the question, “Is EVMS becoming an arm of ODU?”

Aubrey Layne, Sentara’s senior corporate vice president and chief of staff, didn’t share that hesitation, however.

“EVMS is affiliating or actually combining with Old Dominion as part of their plan to become a sustainable medical school,” he said during an August interview.

To make the partnership official, Virginia’s General Assembly would have to give the OK, according to both EVMS spokesperson Vincent Rhodes and Layne, who added that he, along with officials from the two schools, met with Gov. Glenn Youngkin in August about the plan.

A spokesperson from the governor’s office confirmed that Youngkin “had a meeting with the appropriate partners to gather additional information on the collaboration between the entities,” without providing more detail.

“I think the political will is there,” Layne says.

A joint effort

Founded in 1973 as a public institution not affiliated with an undergraduate university, EVMS took shape after community leaders became alarmed about a physician shortage in the region.

“We grew out of the community, and collaboration is in our genes,” says C. Donald Combs, EVMS vice president and dean of the School of Health Professions.

Close cooperation between Sentara and EVMS hasn’t always come naturally, though. In 2020 and 2021, the medical school paid Vienna-based public relations firm Tigercomm $497,000 for crisis communications and community support work in what Tigercomm President Mike Casey has said was a bid to avoid a potential EVMS-ODU-Sentara merger “being pushed by Sentara” at the time. Tigercomm’s work for EVMS came under media scrutiny in 2021 in a series of articles focusing on the fact that Casey had co-founded in 2011 an investigative watchdog blog, Checks & Balances Project, that had been publishing a series of articles critical of Sentara since late 2020. EVMS and Tigercomm were adamant that they didn’t pay C&BP for its coverage of Sentara, and Casey notes that he does not have “ownership or control” of C&BP or its content.

So, how did Sentara and EVMS go from that awkward place to embarking on a partnership with ODU?

“A lot of it has to do with a change in leadership,” Layne says. Aside from Abuhamad, who became EVMS’ permanent president, provost and medical school dean in June, Hemphill became ODU’s ninth president in July 2021, succeeding John Broderick. At Sentara, Kern retired at the end of August, with Dennis Matheis becoming president and CEO in September.

Hemphill, who served as Radford University’s president for five years, came to Norfolk after overseeing the 2019 merger between the Jefferson College of Health Sciences and Carilion Clinic to create Radford University Carilion, which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in health sciences.

In his June letter, Hemphill wrote, “Although much work remains ahead, the vision is clear. ODU and EVMS face an important moment with the promising potential to achieve more through a full integration, which is both impactful and inspiring.”

Sentara, ODU and EVMS officials also note that collaboration will also help improve health care for Hampton Roads residents.

Bottom line

In terms of finances, Sentara makes the argument that EVMS needs to partner with a public university — like Virginia Tech’s partnership with Carilion Clinic to create the VTC School of Medicine — to receive “state funding parity with other Virginia schools” and be better positioned to raise philanthropic dollars.

For fiscal year 2021, EVMS had an annual budget of about $278 million. About $31 million of that came from the state government. Sentara gives more than $60 million to the school for training and education each year, according to Layne. In March, Sentara also donated $6 million to EVMS, ODU and Norfolk State University to develop the ONE School of Public Health, which will be Virginia’s first such institution.

“The issue here has to deal with additional funding, so that the EVMS is a sustainable organization into the future,” Layne says.

Underlying the entire merger discussion is the severe staffing shortage affecting the health care field.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported this year that about 18% of Virginia hospitals are “critically understaffed,” a situation Virginia state Sen. Jen Kiggans, R-Virginia Beach, is familiar with as a nurse practitioner.

“We’ve been in a shortage of primary care providers for a while,” she says. “And then, on top of that, is our mental health care provider workforce challenges.”

Kiggans says a merger between EVMS and ODU would be “instrumental” in bolstering the region’s health care workforce pipeline. “It keeps us competitive with places like Charlottesville and U.Va. and even Richmond and VCU.”

By joining forces, Sentara, EVMS and ODU could share staff members and health science libraries, as well as bolster clinical opportunities for students, she adds. “None of these individual institutions of learning can survive independently.”

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected and updated to clarify the authorship of a blog that published stories about Sentara Healthcare. The Sentara stories were published on the blog Checks & Balances Project, which was co-founded by Mike Casey, the president of public relations firm Tigercomm, but Casey has said he doesn’t own or control C&BP or its content; C&BP is a client of Tigercomm.

Manchin hits gas on Mountain Valley Pipeline

First proposed in 2014, the 303-mile, $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline has seen its construction progress delayed time and time again by federal courts, regulators and environmentalists.

Indeed, MVP has faced so many setbacks that NextEra Energy Inc. said in February it was reevaluating its investment in the natural gas pipeline, citing “a very low probability of pipeline completion.”

The math on that calculation changed, since in late July, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, reached an agreement with Democratic leaders to support the Inflation Reduction Act, a $430 billion climate, tax and health care bill. The party cut a deal with Manchin that included having lawmakers and the Biden administration “take all necessary actions to permit the construction and operation of the Mountain Valley Pipeline.”

The pipeline would transport natural gas from West Virginia through the Roanoke and New River valleys, ultimately connecting to a pipeline near the North Carolina border. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with environmentalists, preventing the pipeline from passing through the Jefferson National Forest and crossing streams. In the initial deal, Democratic leaders agreed to move future pipeline challenges to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, but that would need to be worked into a bill.

Mountain Valley supporters received more good news on Aug. 23 when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted a four-year extension. The previous deadline was Oct. 13.

“With total project work roughly 94% complete, Mountain Valley remains committed to working diligently with federal and state regulators to secure the necessary permits to safely and responsibly finish construction,” says Natalie Cox, a spokesperson for Equitrans Midstream Corp., which will operate the pipeline and has a 48.1% ownership stake.

Equitrans remains committed to seeing the pipeline operational by the second half of 2023, according to Cox.

While several environmental organizations have praised the Inflation Reduction Act, conservation director of Charlottesville-based nonprofit Wild Virginia, says money isn’t worth setting a precedent of lawmakers telling regulating agencies to ignore provisions of the Clean Water Act or the Endangered Species Act to push through a fossil-fuel energy project.

“That just violates the whole principle of the laws, which is you go through a decision-making process, you weigh the facts [and] you make a decision based on those laws,” he says.

This story has been updated to reflect updated information.

Pulaski sees housing future in 3D

Like communities around Virginia, the town of Pulaski faces housing demand far outpacing supply.

“We don’t have enough housing in our area,” says Town Manager Darlene Burcham. “So many of the people who work in our area don’t live in the community.”

One way Pulaski hopes to grow inventory is by working with Iowa-based home builder Alquist 3D to construct houses using 3D-printing technology. Alquist is building two houses on Pierce Avenue, the first of 200 it plans to build in Virginia over the next five years.

Burcham hopes these will be the first two of many in town. She’s talked with executives about other possible parcels.

Using 3D printing for exteriors can shave weeks off a standard construction schedule, reduce jobsite waste and cut building costs by 15%, according to Alquist. The process also allows builders to be less reliant on the volatile lumber market.

Completion depends on how quickly Alquist can purchase hot commodities like windows and doors. “We have the same supply chain issue that every other home builder has,” says Alquist founder and CEO Zachary Mannheimer.

Obtaining concrete to build the homes’ exterior walls won’t be a problem, he says, because Alquist uses a proprietary construction “ink.”

One house in Pulaski will be a model, and the other will be sold in the $200,000 range, Mannheimer estimates. The two houses will be single-story, 1,300-square-foot homes with three bedrooms and two baths.

Alquist’s path to Pulaski began when Mannheimer connected with Andrew McCoy, director of the Virginia Center for Housing Research at Virginia Tech. 

Alquist and VCHR built a test home in Richmond with a $500,000 grant from Virginia Housing. They printed external walls last summer, but a few things need to be completed before it is sold.

While talking with housing officials who worked on the test home and another in Williamsburg, Mannheimer heard about several rural communities, including Pulaski, seeking to increase housing supply.

Initially, Alquist planned to build 200 homes
in Southwest Virginia, but plans evolved once word got out. Now, Mannheimer says, as many as half the homes will be in the region, which fits Alquist’s mission to provide housing in economically distressed and underserved areas.

“Smaller communities [are] where we believe the future of innovation lies,” Mannheimer says. “These towns have been overlooked for decades. They have lots of needs, and they have lots of opportunity.”  

Solid prospects

Detlev Peters has walked into convenience stores in the Hampton Roads area a couple of times recently to find the candy aisle shockingly empty.

“Hershey’s, Reese’s, M&M’s, everything, like they would just have a clean shelf of just nothing,” marvels Peters, who graduated with a degree in maritime and supply chain management from Old Dominion University in 2020.

Peters, who lives in Virginia Beach, works as a business development representative for Cornerstone Systems Inc., a Tennessee-based transportation and logistics solutions provider. He figures the disruptions to the global supply chains that consumers have experienced since the beginning of the pandemic will translate into solid job security for him and other graduates of ODU’s program, advertised as the only bachelor’s degree program of its kind east of the Mississippi River.

“Just because of the challenges that we’re seeing in the supply chain, I think there’s a lot of opportunity … a lot of entry-level positions and a lot of room to grow within those opportunities,” he says.

The U.S. Department of Labor supports Peters’ hunch, projecting that demand for logisticians, who analyze and coordinate an organization’s supply chain, will grow 30% by 2030.

Krista Kubovchik, who will graduate with a double major in maritime and supply chain management and business analytics in December, has already experienced a taste of the great demand for the skills she’s learning at ODU.

Last summer, Kubovchik began interning for Givens Logistics LC, a full-service freight broker and air-freight forwarder based in Chesapeake. The internship grew into a part-time job.

“I work in the transportation department … dealing with dispatching the drivers to pick up the freight,” she explains.

Since starting at Givens, Kubovchik has begun connecting the work she does there with the various concepts she’s studying in her classes. “There’s meaning behind everything I’m learning.”

She is one of about 80 students enrolled in the maritime and supply chain management undergraduate program, according to the program’s director, Ricardo Ungo.

The average ODU student, Ungo says, probably gives little thought to the Port of Virginia, even though they likely drive by it regularly. But the university’s proximity to the port, one of the busiest on the East Coast, is the supply chain management program’s biggest draw.

“You are close to all of those activities, and that provides … a pretty good advantage” for students seeking internships and employment opportunities, Ungo says.

Kubovchik, who’s president of the ODU Propeller Club for students studying maritime and supply chain management, often recruits speakers from the area’s pool of maritime executives. Members are often invited to attend events with the Port of Norfolk’s club chapter, which draws more than 300 members from the maritime, transportation and logistics industries.

Being located near a bustling port and maritime industry means ODU students have a number of choices for internships. “Typically, what I’ve seen is that if they do well in the internships,” Ungo says, “eventually they get hired.”

As part of their classwork, ODU supply chain students typically take on a logistics challenge faced by a local company and figure out how to solve it.

“Let’s say they have a problem in procurement, then we pick a topic there,” Ungo says. “The students work on that for the final project. Then that will benefit them because they have the opportunity to interact with someone in the industry. It’s not just case studies in the textbook.”

The program is offered by the ODU Strome College of Business’ Maritime, Ports & Logistics Institute, described by the university as “a hub where industry practitioners, students, faculty and community can connect and collaborate to develop solutions to challenges in our maritime, industrial and logistics ecosystem.”

The institute’s board of directors is led by Wayne Coleman, chairman and owner of Norfolk-based CV International Inc., which offers logistics and transportation services to the shipping community. Other board members include executives from Dollar Tree Inc., Virginia International Terminals LLC and Norfolk Southern Corp.

“The common denominator is they all have a very strong interest in supporting and growing this program,” says Nancy Grden, associate vice president of ODU’s Institute for Innovation & Entrepreneurship and executive director of the Hampton Roads Maritime Collaborative for Growth & Innovation (HRMC), which works to expand the role of maritime innovation in regional economic development.

Board members have been especially helpful in keeping professors in the maritime and supply chain program up to date on industry developments such as the latest technology, Ungo adds. For example, in 2018, the Port of Virginia and ODU signed an agreement to allow students and faculty to use the port’s Navis software.

For his students, Ungo says, having hands-on opportunities such as that “is a plus when they go to the [job] market.”