Tim and Ben Jordan are first-generation grape growers on a Shenandoah Valley farm that has been in their family since the 1700s.
Although the brothers “leapt off the ground quite blindly” to pursue their passion, Tim Jordan says — first planting grapes in 2007 — their dream of building a winery on the farm proved “a wall of investment” they couldn’t scale.
Instead, with business partner Patt Eagan, they opened Common Wealth Crush Co., a collaborative winemaking business in Waynesboro’s Virginia Metalcrafters complex. Over three years, the company plans to invest $1.5 million in ongoing renovations of 17,000 square feet of space, including a tasting room expected to open this spring.
Their vision, Jordan says, is to provide the resources needed for growth “for others like us who were bootstrapping every step of the way.”
The facility provides a range of services for small-scale growers to build their brands, from full production to helping experienced growers who lack the equipment to make their own wine, Eagan says.
The winery began operation in August 2022 with the necessary equipment — from grape presses to fermentation tanks — to produce 11,000 cases of wine from the 2022 harvest. The vintage represents eight distinct brands, in addition to their own house wines.
The goal over the next three years is to process an estimated 450 tons of Virginia-grown grapes with a market value of $1.1 million and create six jobs, likely five full-time and one seasonal.
If it meets those metrics, the company will receive a $25,000 grant from the city of Waynesboro matching an award announced in October 2022 from the state’s Agriculture and Forestry Industries Development Fund.
The city’s contribution will come primarily as reimbursement of local taxes and fees paid by the company during its first three years, says Greg Hitchin, director of Waynesboro’s Office of Economic Development.
The city expects the winery and a brewery already located in the complex to attract tourists from the Shenandoah National Park corridor. The state has more than 300 wineries that draw 2.64 million visitors and contribute $1.7 billion to the economy annually, according to the governor’s office.
Eagan says the winery is focused on but not limited to the Shenandoah Valley.
Virginia’s varied geology produces “really dynamic and interesting wines,” he says. “Wine as a beverage is such as great storyteller of the place it comes from.”
Warmer winters mean ski resorts must manufacture more snow to keep slopes open, but improved technology has helped offset costs and streamlined the process.
Wintergreen Resort has more than 400 snow guns that over the season can cover 26 trails in 3 feet of snow, says General Manager Jay Gamble. Under optimal conditions over 24 hours, the equipment could cover a football field with 35 to 40 feet of snow.
“Wintergreen has a very powerful snowmaking system,” he says, but “every year it always comes down to the weather.”
While climate conditions vary from year to year, snowmaking has long been a constant for Virginia’s resorts.
“It’s built into our business model,” says Kenny Hess, director of sports and risk management at Massanutten Resort, which will operate 21 trails this season with the help of about 275 machines.
Gamble and Hess say major advances in energy efficiency and automation over the past two decades help resorts contend with climate inconsistencies.
Ten years ago, it took hours to get the snowmaking system into gear, Hess says. Now the operation has shorter snowmaking windows thanks to automation and can even be controlled by cellphone.
Under ideal conditions, an acre can be covered with 2 feet of snow in one hour, but typically it takes 24 to 36 hours of snowmaking in early season to open the slopes.
More efficient technology also has cut labor and energy costs.
“We’re making more snow, but we’re making it at a lower cost than we used to,” Gamble says. Weather stations at different points on the mountain provide real-time readings so that snow guns can be adjusted for subtle temperature variations.
But nature’s still in charge.
Optimally, snowmaking requires a 28-degree wet-bulb temperature, which is temperature adjusted for relative humidity. “The lower the relative humidity, the more snowmaking production we can achieve,” Gamble says.
The science of snowmaking is something guests don’t always understand, Hess says.
“A cold weather weekend comes in and they expect you to have snow,” he says. But it might be 29 or 30 degrees “and we can’t make snow because it’s humid.”
Another misconception is that the snow is artificial. “It’s real snow,” he says, but more durable because of its higher water content.
Water is the key ingredient, Hess says. It takes 175,000 gallons to make 1 acre-foot of snow.
Business professionals will join Emory & Henry College students this summer for a course that will suggest how blockchain technology can help entrepreneurs, ultimately aiding development in Southwest Virginia.
A collaboration between E&H’s School
of Business, InvestSWVA and William &
Mary’s Global Research Institute, the course will demystify the fundamentals of a technology with far-reaching applications for the region, says E&H Business Dean Emmett P. Tracy.
“A lot of people hear the term ‘blockchain’ and think it is something elusive or wrapped in a technology that’s inaccessible,” he says. But the five-week course beginning June 21 won’t require any technical expertise from students.
Blockchain, known for its association with cryptocurrency, is a technology for storing data in chronological “blocks” to form a transparent and immutable chain of transactions.
The course will be taught by Troy Wiipongwii, affiliated faculty member with the W&M Global Research Institute. He plans to discuss entrepreneurial applications such as how to set up a “smart” contract, which uses a program that automatically executes an agreement when terms are met. He’ll also emphasize the added security resulting from the built-in transparency of a blockchain’s shared data collection.
With traditional databases, he says, “the protocol for how that information is set up and how it is tracked and traced is still very much behind the scenes.”
InvestSWVA Director Will Payne says the course traces its origins to Project Thoroughbred, an effort to make the region the Virginia craft beer industry’s primary source of specialty grains. Blockchain technology would provide supply chain transparency to show breweries they can buy “the best grain” closer to home, Payne says. The project plans to use blockchain to track 82 acres of barley to be harvested this summer, he says.
Payne, vice rector of the W&M board of visitors, spoke as he was on a road trip with Wiipongwii and Will Clear, Virginia Department of Energy’s deputy director, to a waste coal pile to consider ways blockchain might help the state’s effort to identify and reclaim such sites. Blockchain could be used to track the location, size and attributes of each pile, Payne says.
“We see lots of opportunity to create blockchain use in the energy space,” Clear says. “We think that development or redevelopment of southwestern Virginia is really about energy and agriculture at the entrepreneurial level.”
One of Terrell Strayhorn’s first assignments as Virginia Union University’s provost was to win final approval for graduate programs seen as a key mechanism for enrollment growth.
It was the early months of the pandemic, he recalls, and the Richmond university was also “knee deep” in the reaffirmation of its accreditation process as it sought approval for eight new master’s degree programs.
Virginia Union — founded in 1865 as one of the first historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the nation — succeeded on all counts. And the programs, ranging from hospitality management to executive MBAs, boosted total enrollment to 1,688 last fall, VUU’s greatest number of students in the past five years.
The university’s diversification effort reflects the approach many of the state’s private, nonprofit institutions are taking to counter an enrollment cliff that threatens higher education in general but is felt most acutely by tuition-dependent liberal arts schools.
“The challenge was there prior to the pandemic, and the pandemic just accelerated the problem even more,” says Matthew Shank, president of the 16-school Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges and the former president of Arlington’s Marymount University.
Enrollment is “a hugely important issue” for private schools, which primarily depend on tuition to carry out their mission, Shank says. “When you take a dip in enrollment, even a small dip, it has a pretty big impact on your overall budget.”
And while the state’s public institutions saw an overall decrease in total enrollment during the past five years, independent colleges in Virginia posted a slight gain as a whole.
According to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, 30 private, nonprofit schools statewide enrolled 148,672 degree-seeking students last fall, compared with 148,157 for fall 2020. But those figures also include 95,148 students enrolled primarily online at Liberty University in Lynchburg.
Overall enrollment for traditional liberal arts colleges has been mixed, says Robert B. Lambeth Jr., president of the Council of Independent Colleges in Virginia Inc., which represents 27 schools. “Some institutions have fared pretty well, [while] others are down. But it’s no question the pandemic has disrupted the procedures.”
Independent colleges focus on personal attention to students, with recruitment beginning with campus visits for high school students.
“And during the pandemic that has been disrupted substantially, which has impacted upon our ability to recruit students in some cases,” Lambeth says.
Sweet Briar College, an all-female college, is slowly growing its enrollment through a focus on women’s leadership. Photo courtesy Sweet Briar College
Even before the pandemic, administrators were worried about demographic shifts that have decreased the pool of potential students and about escalating student loan debt that has families questioning the value of a degree.
And now, Strayhorn says, students are undergoing their own version of the “Great Resignation” that has roiled workplaces. “As we moved through the pandemic, students have changed and their behaviors have changed,” he says, and many are rethinking how they spend their time.
The pandemic accelerated VUU’s plans to move programs online, such as the university’s eMBA geared toward full-time employees, Strayhorn says. That presents its own challenge in keeping students connected to peers and faculty, especially at an HBCU that stresses personalized encouragement for students who are often the first in their families to attend college.
“It sounds cliché, but we’re working around the clock to figure out how to create a high-touch environment in a touchless time,” Strayhorn says.
VUU, long known for its graduate programs in divinity, is adapting its business model, he notes, “to develop a specific niche that aligns with our core values but also responds to the demand of the market.” A new focus on cross-listing classes means students in different graduate programs share courses in core competencies so that, for example, an eMBA class on finances could be taken by a hospitality management student or a theology student interested in financial management from a church perspective.
“It’s exciting to bring our students together in a way that I don’t know all schools have done, allowing us to be cost-efficient and good stewards of the resources we have,” Strayhorn says.
Storms on the horizon
Two national reports underscore the bleak financial outlook and enrollment challenges ahead.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center in January reported that postsecondary enrollment dropped by 2.7% for fall 2021, with a total two-year decline of 5.1%, or 937,500 fewer students, since the beginning of the pandemic.
Enrollment at ECPI rose 5% during the 2020-21 school year, primarily among nursing and health care students. Photo courtesy ECPI
Undergraduate enrollment declined across all institution sectors nationally, with for-profit four-year schools showing the steepest percentage drop at 11.1%, or 65,500 students, from the previous year. At nonprofit private schools, undergraduate enrollment fell nationally by 2.2%, or 58,700 students, in the fall, according to the center.
Overall freshman enrollment stabilized, compared with the precipitous decline of fall 2020, the report said, but enrollment was 9.2% lower than pre-pandemic levels recorded in fall 2019, a decrease of 213,400 students. News was better at nonprofit private four-year colleges, with the number of freshmen enrolled rising by 2.9%, or 11,600 students.
While that’s good news, the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) reported that private, nonprofit colleges and universities provided grants, fellowships and scholarships to nearly half of all undergraduates in the 2020-21 academic year, which means a significant cut in the revenue the institutions would receive for full payments.
In NACUBO’s 2020 annual tuition discounting study, 361 institutions reported 53.9% of all first-time students and 48.1% of all undergraduates received tuition discounts last school year.
Some schools have tried to address this issue by resetting tuition rates. These include Randolph College and, more recently, Roanoke College, which has lowered fall 2022 tuition by 28%, from $46,510 to $33,510.
The schools want their posted tuition rates to reflect more closely what a student actually pays, Shank says, “so there’s not that sticker shock of seeing the tuition as out of the range” of affordability.
Lambeth says one purpose of campus visits has been to help explain financing to families who might see a private education as out of reach.
“Many families are surprised that the total cost of attending at private colleges is much more competitive, much closer to public college costs, but it takes some time to explain that,” he says. “It’s hard to do that on a Zoom call.”
In addition to institutional aid, undergraduates who are Virginia residents are eligible to receive a state-financed Tuition Assistance Grant, which this year was $4,000.
Schools are diversifying their offerings to compete with public institutions, Lambeth says. “We are strong believers in traditional liberal arts education, but we are also strong believers in providing newer programs and opportunities.”
Small liberal arts colleges have proven resilient, despite decades of predictions that they could not survive, says Sweet Briar College President Meredith Woo, whose institution represents a prime example.
In 2015, Sweet Briar’s alumnae thwarted the previous administration’s effort to close the college, a “catastrophic experience” that Woo, who took her current post in 2017, says set the women’s college apart from national trends. “We overcame tremendous challenges to move forward and are on an upward trajectory,” she says.
Sweet Briar’s enrollment was at 454 in fall 2021, and about 80 students are expected to graduate this spring. Woo projects the college will return to an ideal enrollment of 620 to 650 students during the next few years by building “on the strength of our tradition but molding it to take advantage of opportunities for women.”
The college’s core principles and programs are all built around women’s leadership, including an engineering program “without misogyny” and sustainable agriculture with 20 acres of vineyards and a 26,000-square-foot greenhouse.
The safe environment of a women’s college, Woo says, “is a very important distinctive niche” that 20 years ago might have been a hard sell. “It’s not a hard sell anymore.”
Another Virginia single-gender institution, the all-male Hampden-Sydney College, felt the impact of the pandemic on enrollment and recruiting, says President Larry Stimpert.
“The pandemic also coincided with a strategic shift toward increasing selectivity at Hampden-Sydney, which typically involves a temporary dip in enrollment,” Stimpert says. The men’s college enrolled 851 students last fall, down from more than 1,000 five years ago.
Stimpert is encouraged by the increases he’s now seeing in campus visits, applications and deposits. Plus, retention of last year’s freshman class exceeded 90%, the highest in the college’s history “and consistent with the retention rates at the very best private liberal arts colleges in the country.”
Shenandoah University has seen steady growth over the past few years, enrolling 4,287 students last fall. The Winchester university “did not see the pandemic as a pause in operations, planning, service or vision,” President Tracy Fitzsimmons said via email.
Shenandoah re-opened for in-person education and business in June 2020 and has “been operating in-person ever since.” At the start of the 2020-21 academic year, SU became one of the few universities in the country to perform its own COVID surveillance testing through its School of Pharmacy, according to Fitzsimmons.
The university is third in enrollment behind Liberty and Virginia Beach-based Regent University, which began the fall 2021 semester with 10,190 students and later added 196, a Regent spokesman says. About 82% are online.
The University of Richmond enrolled 3,898 students in the fall, a slight decrease that spokeswoman Cynthia Price attributes to the higher number of students studying abroad because they couldn’t travel in fall 2020. More than 200 Spiders went abroad this academic year, but counting those students, overall enrollment increased and was comparable to pre-pandemic levels, she says.
Across the country right now, Shank says, private schools that are highly selective and have a strong reputation nationally are doing very well in enrollment. “We have great diversity in our schools, and many have the capacity to grow enrollment, meaning that they have the seats available.”
Size matters
While private for-profit schools as a sector have taken a hit in enrollment, that has not been the case for Virginia Beach-based ECPI University, says its president, Mark Dreyfus. “When you look at schools like ours that are very hands-on and focused on health care and information technology, we did not see that.”
ECPI, or East Coast Polytechnic Institute, opened in 1966 in Norfolk. It saw its enrollment increase by 5% during the first year of the pandemic, primarily among nursing and health care students, Dreyfus says. Enrollment is back to previous levels now.
ECPI reports 6,500 students enrolled in Virginia, with about 5,000 attending in person on eight campuses and the remainder online. The university also has campuses in the Carolinas, Florida and Texas and an overall enrollment of about 11,000 students.
Meanwhile, many for-profit giants are shutting down or cutting operations. The University of Phoenix, for example, closed its in-person locations in Virginia last August.
Dreyfus says global operations like that shouldn’t be grouped with smaller for-profit schools like ECPI that primarily offer vocational training. “We’re more career-side as opposed to the four-year online schools, and there’s a real difference,” he says. “It really is not the same kind of institution.”
He sees a clear reason why there are fewer four-year, for-profit schools than there were a decade ago.
“The accountability is much higher than it used to be,” Dreyfus says. “It’s a much different sector than it was, given that over the last 10 years there’s been so much more regulation and accountability.”
At a glance
Enrollment at private, nonprofit institutions
Total enrollment of degree-seeking students at 30 private, nonprofit institutions as reported to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia:
Fall 2021:148,672
Fall 2020:148,157
Fall 2019: 141,477
(Increase is largely due to enrollment gains at Liberty University, which grew from 85,586 in 2019 to 95,148 in 2021.)
TAG funding
SCHEV tracks enrollment at private, nonprofit schools whose students receive annual state Tuition Assistance Grants, which are not need-based. The amounts of individual awards are based on the number of eligible in-state students and funding appropriated by the General Assembly. For about 23,000 Virginia residents eligible this academic year, the grant is $4,000 for undergraduates and $2,200 for graduate students in health professions, according to the Council of Independent Colleges in Virginia.
The amount has been reduced for remote programs. Effective fall 2021, new students enrolled in online or distance learning receive TAG awards of $2,000 for undergraduates and $2,200 for graduate-level health studies. Continuing students are eligible to receive the previous award of up to $3,400.
CARES Act and related funding
Private colleges and their students received a share of the federal funding that came to Virginia for pandemic relief. Of the more than $2.2 billion that was directed to Virginia higher education, $1.7 billion went to public institutions and $482.8 million went to private schools, according to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
Enrollment at public colleges and universities
Since fall 2017, total undergraduate enrollment declined by 7% at state-supported colleges and universities.
In-state undergraduate numbers dropped by 2,917 at the 15 four-year institutions and by about 23,400 students at 23 community colleges. Two-year Richard Bland College, a junior college in Petersburg, grew by more than 450 to 2,605 students.
Demand for welders is so great that some of Eddie Fultz’s Virginia Highlands Community College students are being hired for part-time jobs while they’re still completing their training.
“We’re in a manufacturing area where we cannot meet the demand,” says Fultz, coordinator of VHCC’s welding program. “It’s a great problem to have for the college. It’s a great problem to have for people graduating from the program.”
But, he says, the program doesn’t have the capacity to meet its training needs.
That will change this fall with the completion of a $6 million, 18,000-square-foot facility at VHCC that will expand the college’s welding and diesel technology certification programs and bring the off-site programs onto the college’s Abingdon campus.
The Advanced Technology and Workforce Development Center is “specifically designed to meet the industrial needs of our community,” says VHCC President Adam Hutchison. “These are two programs that have high demand and have great-paying jobs at the other end of the training.”
The building also will house the college’s workforce development division, which provides customized training programs and credentials. Welding and diesel courses currently are offered in separate off-campus spaces that both programs have outgrown, Hutchison says.
“We’re going to triple the size,” Fultz says of the welding shop, which is now under 2,000 square feet. With additional welding booths, the number of students will rise from 32 to 48. The diesel program will increase from 32 to 40.
Bringing the programs onto campus will also connect the students, who earn career studies certificates, to other VHCC resources.
Hutchison credits the “very forward-thinking” design and build team at Bristol, Tennessee-based BurWil Construction Inc. for designing a flexible facility that could be adapted for changing needs, such as VHCC’s plans for adding an alternative fuels vehicles repair program.
VHCC broke ground on the center in November 2021. It’s the first major facility to be built on campus since 1992.
The project is being funded through private gifts, grants and institutional funds. The largest contribution comes from an anonymous community member connected to an industry that employs VHCC graduates, according to Hutchison. The Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission contributed $1.3 million.
Although most of the funds have been raised, Hutchison says, there’s still a $1.5 millionfunding gap “we’d like to close” in order to equip the facility “in a way best for students.”
William & Mary’s first African American dean is seeking to transform the university’s law school in ways both fundamental and symbolic.
Introducing a 12-part action plan titled “Why We Can’t Wait — An Agenda for Equity and Justice,” A. Benjamin Spencer says he intends to train a generation of lawyers who will focus on “this enduring inequity and injustice that the country just can’t seem to shake.”
Invoking the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to action, Spencer has outlined 12 initiatives that include a new Center for Racial & Social Justice, a community law clinic and scholarships for students dedicated to becoming advocates for equal justice.
But with only seven African Americans in his first-year class of 230 law students, Spencer also has set about changing imagery and first impressions to make the nation’s oldest law school more welcoming.
“A lot of the preexisting messaging is oriented in the 18th century,” Spencer says. “Even the diversity page that we used to have, the first few sentences were about the 1700s and Thomas Jefferson.”
Spencer’s quest to make W&M more inclusive is a goal reflected in social justice initiatives across the university, says Chon Glover, W&M’s chief diversity officer. Some efforts have been years in the making, such as The Lemon Project, a university initiative described as an “attempt to rectify wrongs perpetrated against African Americans by William & Mary through action or inaction.” It plans to erect a memorial to African Americans enslaved by the university.
But other efforts, including new principles for naming and renaming structures and spaces on campus, are the result, she says, of “the national awakening and reckoning” after the May 25 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Anthony M. Joseph, president of the W&M Student Assembly, sees a new urgency “to prioritize and put in the forefront of the conversation” some ongoing issues, especially the treatment of Black and brown students.
During the fall 2020 semester, the Student Assembly launched the Police Policy Project to collect and analyze data on student-police interactions on and off campus, he says.
It is focused “minutely and acutely” on Obama administration policy recommendations for 21st century policing that emphasize “leading with respect and integrity,” Joseph says.
People might think “Williamsburg is not Minneapolis,” he says. “But we are always one step away from that happening, and it starts with perceived or apparent lack of respect.”
A heavy ‘Hearth’
Making W&M a more welcoming place to Williamsburg’s African American community is another priority, he says. Joseph served on the committee that worked on the naming guidelines, which acknowledged that the university “has not been welcoming and inclusive for all.”
Joseph says an important step toward that goal will be the creation of a memorial to the African Americans enslaved by William & Mary, a public reminder similar to the memorial to enslaved people installed at the University of Virginia earlier this year.
William & Mary’s $2 million memorial is scheduled for groundbreaking in early 2021 and completion in fall 2021. It will break through the wall that surrounds the university’s Historic Campus, the two-acre, diamond-shaped area containing university buildings dating from the 1600s and 1700s. It will also create a new entranceway for the campus.
Jody Lynn Allen is director of The Lemon Project, a university initiative to “rectify wrongs perpetrated against African Americans by William & Mary.”
Black residents have “a historical memory of when the college walls went up,” Joseph says, and felt “they were being pushed out” at the time Colonial Williamsburg was established.
Jody Lynn Allen, director of The Lemon Project, says African American residents saw the wall “as a real barrier, a way of keeping them out. So, the memorial is breaking that wall, literally and figuratively.”
Titled “Hearth,” the memorial will measure 16 feet wide, 45 feet long and 20 feet high, and resemble a brick fireplace. It will be built by Richmond-based construction firm Kjellstrom & Lee Inc. across from the admissions office on the south side of the 1690s Wren Building, the oldest building on campus.
“The hearth has two meanings in the life of the enslaved,” explains Allen, an assistant professor of history. There was the harsh hearth they labored around, firing bricks and boiling water for laundry. But there was also the hearth they could gather around when they had moments to themselves.
“The hearth illuminates, so it illuminates the fact that they were there and that they were human beings,” she says.
The Lemon Project is named for Lemon, a man who was enslaved by W&M, and his name will be one of about 190 to be included on the memorial. In instances when the names of enslaved people were not recorded, those people will be listed by the work they did, Allen says. More names will be added as The Lemon Project’s research continues.
“It’s a reparative endeavor,” Allen says of the project, which was established by the board of visitors in 2009 as the result of a Student Assembly resolution. The project’s next phase will be to conduct genealogy research to trace descendants of those who were enslaved by the university.
More than $1 million in private donations was raised for the memorial; the board of visitors, which in 2018 apologized for W&M’s role in slavery, provided matching funds.
Richmond-based architectural firm Baskerville designed the memorial based on a concept chosen after an international competition. The winning proposal was submitted by William Sendor, a 2011 alumnus.
“What he did was to use this symbol to remember the past but also, as we move forward, to rekindle their memory,” Allen says.
“The final concept design has the gravitas we sought. It gives dignity and presence to those who were enslaved by William & Mary and whose labor built the university – without romanticizing that painful history,” W&M President Katherine A. Rowe said in a statement issued in August. “In the process of refining the design, we recognized that the memorial site will reimagine the Jamestown Road entrance to campus. Both symbolically and actually, the first step for many on campus will be through this more forthright telling of our history.”
Pursuing equity
A. Benjamin Spencer became dean of the William & Mary Law School in July.
In September, the W&M board also approved new principles for naming and renaming university buildings and other assets. One change quickly approved was the renaming of Trinkle Hall — named for E. Lee Trinkle, a Jim Crow-era Virginia governor — to Unity Hall.
Glover says the working group that recommended the naming principles heard from people on both sides of the issue: alumni “who were very protective of the William & Mary they knew,” but also students “who expressed how uncomfortable and alienating it felt to walk around campus and to not see any kind of balance.”
Changes might seem to be happening too quickly for some and too slowly for others, but she sees it as more of an evolution. Glover says W&M isn’t the same university it was when she arrived in 1996 for her first job with student affairs.
“The civic discourse has changed,” she says. Students expect a different learning environment that reflects a broad definition of diversity that includes race, religion, gender and gender identity, “but also political thought. … They know that in order to be true, critically thinking leaders they need to have all those perspectives.”
At the law school, Spencer plans to increase diversity, not just in the student body but also in the imagery on the school’s walls and website.
The law school has been a lonely place during his first semester on the job. With nine children at home, Spencer is one of the few people who have opted to work from the office each day rather than remotely during the pandemic.
When he finally can welcome visitors to his office, he hopes to show them a portrait of one of his role models, Charles Hamilton Houston. Houston was the Howard University Law School dean and NAACP special counsel who helped dismantle U.S. segregation laws. Like Spencer, he was a Harvard Law graduate. “He trained lawyers who went on to change the country,” Spencer says.
Among Spencer’s goals is to establish need-based scholarships to attract more students of color. “I don’t know what the right number is,” he says, “but it’s not seven Black students.”
William & Mary Student Assembly President Anthony Joseph
Merit scholarships, which are based on academic scores, he says, contribute to an inequitable system in which lower income students who are paying full price “end up subsidizing students who are getting scholarships.”
Spencer is the son of retired U.S. District Judge James R. Spencer, who was the first African American chief judge for the Eastern District of Virginia and the first Black federal judge in Virginia. The younger Spencer was on the law faculty of the University of Virginia when he was selected as the first African American dean of any school at W&M.
Founded in 1693, W&M is the nation’s second-oldest college, behind Harvard, but its law school is ranked as the oldest in the country. Spencer, who became dean in July, began formulating his agenda soon after the killing of George Floyd. But he says the course he has set is not new.
The law school was founded “to train citizens who are going to be engaged in civic life,” Spencer says. “That’s part of the legacy of the school already.”
At a glance
Founded The second-oldest university in the United States, William & Mary was established in 1693 under a royal charter signed by King William III and Queen Mary II of of England, Ireland and Scotland.
Campus Stretching across 1,200 acres in downtown Williamsburg, William & Mary includes the Martha Wren Briggs Amphitheatre, Lake Matoaka and College Woods. Its circa-1695 Wren Building is the oldest U.S. university building still in use.
Enrollment (fall 2020)
Undergraduate: 6,236
Graduate: 2,703
Class of 2024: 1,525
Employees
The largest employer in Williamsburg, William & Mary employs more than
2,400 people.
Faculty*
754 full-time and 181 part-time faculty
Tuition and fees, housing and financial aid*
In-state tuition and fees: $23,628
Out-of-state tuition and fees: $46,854
Room and board: $12,926
Average financial aid awarded to full-time, in-state freshmen seeking
assistance in 2018-19: $19,449
Lance R. Collins was hired to lead Virginia Tech’s $1 billion Innovation Campus in one world, but he begins work Aug. 1 in another.
But the Innovation Campus’ new vice president and executive director sees the disruption fueled by the pandemic and recession as only sharpening the mission of Tech’s initiative to create a tech talent pipeline in Northern Virginia.
“This has really upped the ante considerably,” says Collins, who previously worked as Cornell University’s engineering dean for a decade.
“With disruption comes innovation,” says Tech’s associate vice president for innovation and partnerships, Brandy Salmon, who has been managing director of the project. “This campus and our mission are ever more important.”
An analysis by the Greater Washington Partnership reinforces that view, says Russ Ramsey, chair of the partnership and of Capital CoLAB, an initiative promoting collaboration among the region’s universities and businesses.
Taking into account the pandemic’s economic fallout, the research foresees a 50% tech talent supply gap by 2025, says Ramsey, chair and co-founder of Ramsey Asset Management.
Tech’s campus represents “a major opportunity for the capital region to narrow our digital tech supply gaps and drive inclusive growth,” he says.
Groundbreaking on Tech’s first building in Alexandria’s North Potomac Yard is still a year away, but the Innovation Campus will launch its inaugural fall semester at Tech’s existing academic space in Falls Church on Aug. 24. (Tech said in June it plans to expand and redevelop its Northern Virginia Center in Falls Church, which, as of August, no longer shares space with the University of Virginia.)
Amid some pandemic-related uncertainty, between 125 to 150 students are expected to enroll in four master’s programs in computer science and computer engineering. By 2028, the number will rise to about 750 master’s students, plus Ph.D. candidates, postdoctoral associates and undergraduates taking part in experiential learning programs.
Students will be taught by faculty working alongside industry partners, Collins says, to bring the “experience aspect of technology alongside the fundamentals” taught in the classroom.
“We will build an education that integrates corporate America onto the campus in ways that you don’t see in a traditional campus,” he says.
Forging bonds with industry
The graduate campus will be located near Amazon.com Inc.’s HQ2 East Coast headquarters campus in Arlington — the prime reason behind the Innovation Campus’ creation.
But Collins says the Innovation Campus will not work exclusively with any one company.
“We want to educate students and have those students have options wherever they go,” he says. “We’re not hard-lining anybody into anything. They will choose to follow whatever they feel is their best career path forward.”
Technology is driven by the private sector, so integrating the two gives students the chance to work on relevant problems, Collins says, and understand where industry is headed.
“It’s the nature of the beast that proximity is reinforcing,” he says.
Collins doesn’t see a conflict with academia being closely entwined with industry.
Silicon Valley, he points out, became what it is because of relationships forged between tech companies and the talent pool provided by higher education institutions like Stanford, Berkeley and Cal Tech.
Northern Virginia has the opportunity to be even more influential because of the region’s federal policymakers, he says.
“The pace with which technology advances is just skyrocketing. That creates real challenges,” he says. “It’s almost like technology can zoom ahead of our ability to completely understand all of the impact.”
“Because of all of the interconnects that are in one location,” the Northern Virginia tech sector has the opportunity to help sort out the complex relationship between laws and technology, Collins adds.
‘A time of technology’
In the Washington region, engineers already are having their moment in higher education. Two of Collins’ friends, Gregory Washington and Darryll J. Pines, became the presidents of George Mason University and the University of Maryland, respectively, in July.
Collins says it’s “an interesting convergence” for three African American engineers to move into leadership positions.
“Historically, that’s relatively rare to see engineering people moving into presidential roles,” he says. “But I think it’s appropriate. I think this is a time of technology like we’ve never seen before.”
Though Collins expects there will be opportunities for collaboration in the future, for now he’s concentrating on “bootstrapping” a new campus.
The Virginia Tech Innovation Campus site positions the university and its future partners near the nation’s capital, diverse industries and leading tech companies, including Amazon.com Inc. and its HQ2 East Coast headquarters in Arlington. Photo courtesy Virginia Tech
Tech’s 300,000-square-foot academic building is scheduled to open in 2024.
The four-acre campus will anchor the first phase of Alexandria’s North Potomac Yard Innovation District in National Landing on approximately 15 acres.
Phase One plans call for a mixed-use district that will include six other residential, retail and office buildings, open spaces, a public park and a new Metrorail station. It will be built on the site of a Regal Cinemas multiplex on Potomac Avenue that closed during the pandemic.
The overall development by Lionstone Investments and JBG Smith eventually will encompass about 65 acres.
The Tech academic building, with a price tag of $275 million, is being designed by the architecture and planning firm SmithGroup, based in Detroit.
The geometric design features a glass and metal façade with terraces that connect to green space. It will be sculpted to maximize power generated from photovoltaics in the glass of the façade and from a solar array on the roof. In a nod to the Blacksburg campus, the dolomite limestone known as Hokie Stone will be incorporated into the construction.
Another 250,000 square feet of partner space, the Innovation Building, is expected to open at the same time to provide space for startups and corporate facilities.
The Virginia Tech Foundation will lease space from the developer and then sublease up to 75,000 square feet to Tech or other partners, according to Michael Stowe, Tech’s media relations director. Tech has no other financial commitments to the building, he says.
Stowe says the timeline for building two additional academic buildings planned for the campus will be determined by growth in the programs.
The inaugural class of students and faculty will work from the Falls Church location, following public health guidance on whether classes should be held online, in person or in a hybrid format.
Collins’ primary office will be in Alexandria in leased space in the National Industries for the Blind building on Potomac Avenue, adjacent to the Innovation Campus’ future location. The space will house the campus’ executive offices and a café-style area for student work groups, seminars and community engagement.
A pipeline loop
For the next two academic years, the university is offering grants of $3,000 or $5,000 per semester to Virginia residents enrolled in its computer science or computer engineering master’s programs in Blacksburg or Northern Virginia.
On the Blacksburg campus, Virginia Tech plans to increase undergraduate enrollment by 2,000 students in computer science and related disciplines to help meet the state’s tech needs.
Tech draws nearly a third of its undergraduates from Northern Virginia, and Collins sees Blacksburg as a pipeline to the Innovation Campus.
“You can almost think of it as a loop,” he says of undergraduates in Blacksburg who will return home to further their education on the new campus and then join a tech company.
“There’s really a very exciting future for them when they finish their studies,” he says.
Brandy Salmon, who has led the team responsible for developing the campus plan, says the hiring of Collins was “a fantastic milestone” in that work. “He is bringing so much with him,” she says.
She notes that he had a seminal role in the establishment of Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island in New York City, which she says is “one of the closest parallel projects” to what the Innovation Campus is trying to achieve.
There are similarities but also differences, as Tech plans “to leverage our unique environment in this point and time in the world,” she says.
The COVID-19 pandemic that abruptly forced workplaces and classrooms online has underscored the importance of research into topics ranging from artificial intelligence to cyberphysical systems.
“Those kinds of key issues of the digital tech sector were already in our plans and are now more relevant than ever,” she says.
In addition to her role with the campus project, Salmon leads a complementary effort called LINK+LICENSE+LAUNCH, which she describes as “the gateway for industry partners into the university.” Her team works with companies to commercialize technology and research while managing the intellectual assets of the university.
“We believe that the Innovation Campus is a great opportunity to do that work at scale in a really important place in the world and with really important partners,” she says, adding that the goal will be to produce skilled students for industry partners. “We have baked industry needs and their priorities into everything that we’ve done.”
Salmon gives credit to Amazon as the catalyst for “this investment in higher ed. They helped encourage an ecosystem of industry in Seattle, and we’d love to think about that same tech sector ecosystem coming online in this region,” she says.
Collins expects other universities will emulate the satellite tech campus concept because urban areas in need of tech talent aren’t always near flagship institutions.
“Technology is just a huge growth sector of the economy, and it’s all about having talented people to drive that growth,” he says. “Where do you go for talented people? You go to universities.”
VIRGINIA TECH INNOVATION CAMPUS
Virginia Tech’s Innovation Campus will make its home in the first phase of a new mixed-use development and innovation district that JBG Smith is developing near the future Potomac Yard Metro station. Rendering by SmithGroup, courtesy Virginia Tech
Purpose: Virginia Tech’s $1 billion Alexandria campus will partner with local industry to create a skilled workforce for tech companies as part of Virginia’s successful bid to bring Amazon HQ2 to Northern Virginia.
The campus: The Innovation Campus’ 300,000-square-foot, $275 million academic building is scheduled to open in 2024. Opening at the same time will be 250,000 square feet of partner space for startups and corporate facilities. Four master’s programs in computer science and computer engineering are expected to enroll 750 students, to be taught by 50 research faculty, by 2028.
Location: The campus will be located in an approximately 15-acre mixed-use development in Alexandria in the National Landing Innovation District in North Potomac Yard, about two miles from Amazon’s HQ2 headquarters in Arlington. The first phase will include residential, retail and office facilities, plus open space. The project will be part of an overall 65-acre development from Lionstone Investments and JBG Smith.
Lance R. Collins. Photo courtesy Virginia Tech
LANCE R. COLLINS
Position: Inaugural vice president and executive director of Virginia Tech Innovation Campus
Former position: Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering at Cornell University for past decade
Achievements: Part of the leadership team that successfully bid to partner with New York City to build Cornell Tech, which opened on the Roosevelt Island campus in 2017. Honored with Mosaic Medal of Distinction for work to increase diversity in engineering, including more than doubling the proportion of underrepresented minority students and increasing undergraduate female enrollment to more than twice the national average.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, Princeton University, 1981; master’s and Ph.D. in chemical engineering, University of Pennsylvania, 1983 and 1987
Alita Robinson, a second-year University of Virginia student from Delaware, delivers a personal message when she calls potential donors seeking support for financial aid programs.
“I always tell people the only reason I’m at U.Va. and have these opportunities … is because I got a scholarship,” says Robinson, who plans to study educational policies and their impact on minority youth.
Robinson is one of nearly 2,040 undergraduates at U.Va. this academic year who are classified as first-generation college students, meaning neither parent graduated from a four-year college or university.
They’re a group that is the focus of heightened attention and support, and not just because the university’s president, James E. Ryan, shares their background.
From farm kid to billionaire
U.Va. alum David Walentas donated $100 million to the university in 2019. Photo courtesy BerlinRosen
In October 2019, U.Va. announced a $100 million donation — primarily to support first-generation students — from New York billionaire real estate developer David Walentas, a 1961 graduate who found his way to Mr. Jefferson’s university from a farm in upstate New York with the help of a scholarship.
“Attending U.Va. was a transformational experience for me and helped lay the foundation for the rest of my life,” says Walentas, who made the gift with his wife, Jane. “College opened a lot of doors I didn’t know existed and exposed me to tremendous educators and ambitious students — a monumental step from working on a farm as a kid.”
Walentas, also a 1964 graduate of U.Va.’s Darden School of Business, founded the real estate development company Two Trees Management in 1968. Two Trees is credited with transforming the Brooklyn neighborhood known as DUMBO — short for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass — into a popular destination.
Of his gift, $75 million will be used for scholarships and fellowships for first-generation students, and $25 million will finance fellowships and professorships through the Jefferson Scholars Foundation and Darden.
The university announced its $5 billion “Honor the Future” campaign, which also recognized the university’s 2019 bicentennial, in June 2018.
“After 200 years of serving this community and this country, it’s important to ask what comes next for the University of Virginia,” Ryan said at the time. “The answer is that there is no limit to the good that this institution can do for others. This campaign plays a critical role in allowing us to pursue these ambitions together, and I am eager to support this effort.”
The university already has raised $2.8 billion toward its goal.
Included in the capital campaign’s total is the largest private gift in U.Va.’s history — a $120 million donation made in January 2019 from husband-and-wife alumni Jaffray and Merrill Woodriff to establish the U.Va. School of Data Science. The university’s 12th school won approval from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia in September and will build on the degree programs previously offered by U.Va.’s Data Science Institute.
Described as a “school without walls” that will conduct interdisciplinary research, it eventually will be housed in a 70,000-square-foot facility planned for the intersection of Emmet Street and Ivy Road.
A ‘bright opportunity’
Walentas hopes his gift “becomes the bright opportunity for other first-generation students to receive a quality education and life-changing experience.
“I know what it’s like to be held back by financial constraints, so I took advantage of every opportunity that came my way,” he says.
His comment echoes Robinson’s assessment of how a scholarship already has broadened her world.
“I don’t think people always realize what an education means to a first-generation student,” she says. “When I say my education means everything for me, it’s not just for me — it’s for my parents as well.”
When Robinson was growing up, her household wasn’t the strongest financially, she says. “Everything always came down to the dollar.”
The idea of going out of state seemed out of reach, and that wasn’t really on her radar anyway. “I never had a true dream school per se, especially as a first-gen [student]. It’s not like my mom went to so-and-so school,” Robinson explains. She expected she would go to college in Delaware and live at home to cut expenses.
But after she learned about U.Va. through a teacher who was a graduate, she was able to access scholarships and financial aid that cover the majority of her out-of-state tuition. She works part time at Starbucks and has taken out loans to cover her living expenses. Last year, she worked two jobs, including one with the student fundraising program Cavalier Connect.
The university has increased its efforts to enroll more first-generation students, who number more than 500 in this year’s entering class, a 19% rise from the previous year.
21st-century life prep
U.Va. also has bolstered programs to help first-generation students navigate life on the Grounds, and that has helped build a community “so you don’t feel like you’re alone,” Robinson says.
First-generation students “add a hustle and grind and an appreciation for education,” she says. But “you are surrounded by a lot of legacy children [who] knew U.Va. was in their blood, where, for me, I didn’t really know U.Va. existed.”
Robinson had the chance to engage with students from different backgrounds during her first year, when she opted into a new curriculum being piloted by the College of Arts & Sciences.
In October, the Arts & Sciences faculty voted to fully adopt the New College Curriculum for students to fulfill general education requirements.
The redesigned curriculum introduces first-year students to fundamental modes of inquiry through engagement courses with a format that Robinson says gave her “different points of view related to real-world topics.” The way the courses were structured resulted in “a lot more dialogue with the person next to me,” she says.
The curriculum also focuses on what the college terms “vital literacies,” stressing writing skills, proficiency in a second language and “quantitative and computational fluency essential to navigating an ever more data-driven world.”
Ian Baucom, dean of Arts & Sciences, says the university’s New College Curriculum better prepares first-year students for 21st-century lives. Photo by Dan Addison, courtesy University of Virginia
Arts & Sciences Dean Ian Baucom says the revision represents the first major change in the school’s curriculum in more than 40 years.
“At a time when a liberal arts education is under heavy scrutiny, we are staking a claim on the power of what it can do for our students, especially as they enter an increasingly complex and interconnected world,” Baucom adds.
Through the engagement courses, he says, “students learn fundamental habits of mind to better prepare them for 21st-century lives — from wrestling with ethical questions, to fully appreciating the arts and aesthetics, to understanding empirical truths as scientists do, to engaging differences constructively in a world of people with different views, histories and backgrounds.”
At its September meeting, SCHEV also approved a master’s program in media, culture and technology that Baucom says reflects employer demand and student interest.
“Beyond the Facebooks and Googles of the world, there are agencies, consulting firms and other organizations looking for talent in media research and policy,” he says. “In a similar way, we think Amazon’s HQ2 will have an impact on the market for this in Northern Virginia.”
Living wage commitment
Despite all this progress, the fall semester saw the university gather some negative press after a Kaiser Health News analysis detailed how the U.Va. Health System’s aggressive pursuit of unpaid medical bills was forcing families into bankruptcy. The report led Ryan and Gov. Ralph Northam, both of whom said they were unaware of the practices, to promise reforms.
The university also stepped up to aid low-income employees as Ryan announced an agreement with major contractors to increase the minimum wage for most university contractors to at least $15 an hour. The agreement meant a raise for about 800 full-time contracted employees and followed the announcement in March of the “living wage” commitment for the university’s full-time, benefits-eligible workers in both the academic and medical divisions.
The increases were effective Jan. 1. About 1,400 university workers were covered by the March decision at an added annual cost of about $3.5 million to U.Va.
According to the university, the lowest salary its workers were making was $12.75 per hour, compared with the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
At her part-time job at the Starbucks in Newcomb Hall, Robinson says she works with people who will benefit from that decision.
“I think I value that job so much because I can converse with people from the Charlottesville community,” she says.
She’s had the opportunity to share some of what she’s learned as a first-generation student with a co-worker worried about how she will afford college for her daughter.
“A lot of those same struggles my parents were going through,” Robinson says.
Kenneth J. Wynne is working in his Richmond laboratory on new technology to protect patients from infections linked to the use of ventilators and urinary catheters.
Medical devices “too often are superhighways for bacteria to go from the skin or from a caretaker’s touch into the body,” says Wynne. WynnVision, his company in the Virginia Bio+Tech Park, is developing ways to reduce infection without the use of antibiotics that can lead to “super-bugs.”
Meanwhile, in the lab of another biotech park startup, Elaine Horn-Ranney is testing a gel used in a product called Perf-Fix. Her company, Tympanogen, plans to market the gel-patch product as a way to repair perforated eardrums without surgery. She co-founded the company while working as a doctoral student at Tulane University. In December, Tympanogen sent samples to the International Space Station to see what other ways the gel may be used to help healing.
But back on Earth, the road between product concept and product launch can be daunting for a new medical device or technology. “You have to be clear-eyed when you decide to do something like this,” says Wynne, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor of chemical and life-science engineering.
The development of a product, he says, involves “a very complex, beautiful web” of support and years of hard work for an idea to be researched, tested and successfully marketed.
31% increase
In Virginia, that effort is showing results, even though the state isn’t top-ranked in the bioscience field.
Analysis released last year found the medical-device subsector of Virginia’s bioscience industry grew four times faster than the national average. In 2016, the commonwealth had 184 medical device and equipment companies, a 31% increase from 2014, according to a biennial report by TEConomy Partners LLC.
“I think it’s increasing exponentially, almost by the month,” says Barbara D. Boyan, dean of VCU’s College of Engineering. “Richmond seems to have found its legs and is very focused on entrepreneurial activity.”
A critical issue is the support of investors who can take a startup to the next level, says Boyan, a researcher and entrepreneur who holds many patents. “Virginia has a great startup climate, but it’s missing what I call the translation climate,” she says.
There are exceptions. Boyan points to Kaléo, a Richmond pharmaceutical firm that is nationally known for the opioid overdose treatment Evzio and for autoinjectors for life-threatening allergic reactions.
Other success stories around the state include:
In Leesburg, K2M Group Holdings Inc., which develops and commercializes spine technologies, was acquired last year by the medical technologies firm Stryker Corp. for $1.4 billion.
In Charlottesville, University of Virginia startup TypeZero Technologies Inc. is simplifying the lives of people with Type 1 diabetes with smartphone-based artificial pancreas systems that automatically regulate insulin delivery.
In Norfolk, Embody Inc. builds implants for tendon and ligament repair using regenerative technology to heal soft-tissue injuries.
A growth opportunity?
Jeffrey M. Gallagher, CEO of Virginia Bio, a life-science trade association, sees development of medical devices and technology as a major growth opportunity.
Virginia might not rank among “overall high-power biomedical hubs like Boston and San Francisco,” he notes, but the state exemplifies “a dispersed proliferation of innovation, startups and university research” that has been brought about by changes in science, technology and medicine.
This growth was a major focus of Virginia Bio’s THRiVE 2019 conference scheduled for May 2 in Richmond.
Virginia’s bioscience industry in 2016 employed more than 24,000 people in nearly 1,900 businesses, according to the nationwide analysis by TEConomy, which was conducted for the trade association Biotechnology Innovation Organization.
The industry has grown at a rate more than twice the national average, the report found. While research, testing and medical laboratories accounted for 50% of all Virginia bioscience jobs, employment growth was driven by the surge in medical device and equipment enterprises, the study noted.
In 2016, the subsector employed 2,415 people, with average annual pay of $71,555. Those numbers represent an increase of nearly 12% in employees and a 3.8% rise in pay since 2014.
The direct-effect multiplier puts the total employment impact of the medical device and equipment subsector at 6,245 jobs.
Less risky path?
Gallagher, who will step down as head of Virginia Bio later this year, says one reason for the growth of medical device and technology companies is that they are seen by some investors as having a lower level of risk compared with drug developers.
Generally, creating a device takes less time than developing a drug, which can involve “the most brilliant people in the world who have all the right data,” Gallagher says.
Nonetheless, after years of testing, “ultimately you have to inject [the drug] in the most complex thing we possibly know, the human body, and you just never know what’s going to happen,” he says.
But Boyan says the time needed to develop and test a medical device, especially one used inside the body, should not be underestimated. Two of her patented devices each took about 12 years to reach the market.
People sometimes think a device “looks so small, and it looks so simple, how can it cost that much,” she says. “It’s important to realize the amount of design and manufacturing and testing that goes into it.”
Her work focuses on bone and cartilage biology and musculoskeletal tissue engineering, including dental and spine implants.
“I’ve had a very happy time seeing devices that I’ve participated in the development of make it to the marketplace,” she says. “And one of them is in my back.”
‘A really big tent’
Bioscience covers a diverse mix of technologies, products and research, making the industry a challenge to define, says the TEConomy/BIO report, “Investment, Innovation and Job Creation in a Growing U.S. Bioscience Industry.”
The common thread is the application of knowledge in the life sciences and how living organisms function.
Gallagher says Virginia Bio, which was founded in 1992, brings together a large community of companies working on life-science innovations to address patient needs.
“We purposely have a really big tent,” he says, to share ideas and resources.
Horn-Ranney of Tympanogen says that she has found Virginia’s bioscience environment to be more collaborative and less competitive than the one she observed in the Northeast.
“It’s an exciting time, especially in Virginia,” she says. The stepped-up pace around medical innovations helps young companies “because having a stronger community gives a lot more support.”
She expects Food and Drug Administration approval for Perf-Fix will take another two years as Tympanogen focuses on safety studies and methods to streamline the product manufacture.
“There are good and bad things about being involved in a very highly regulated industry,” Horn-Ranney says. “The FDA has a clear-cut description of what needs to be accomplished.”
The regulatory timeline may be much longer than what entrepreneurs encounter in other fields, she says, “but there are guidelines to indicate what pathway you need to be taking and boxes to be checking in order to get approval for the device.”
One step Tympanogen took to shorten its timeline was to begin its research with a gel that already had FDA approval, she says. The Perf-Fix gel acts as a scaffold that allows cells to grow across the perforated eardrum while resorbing the material.
In addition to conducting the science behind the product, the 5-year-old company interviewed surgeons and patients, asking how they would prefer a ruptured eardrum to be treated — in an office or surgical suite?
Surgery now is considered “the gold standard” for treatment, but that approach has changed little since the 1960s, Horn-Ranney says. Her research found surgeons “were hungry for some innovation in that space. So that motivated us to keep working on a solution for them.”
The surveys also revealed the parents of young children also wanted change. Children often suffer eardrum ruptures as the result of infections. “That’s data we can show to investors,” Horn-Ranney says.
Investor support
Investor support is crucial to innovators at every stage of the development of a device or technology, but it is especially crucial at the inception of an idea.
“That earliest-stage funding is the most challenging funding as you’re still trying to prove out your concept,” says Carrie Roth, president and CEO of the VA Bio+Tech Park and of Activation Capital, a nonprofit that provides mentoring resources as well as direct investment to strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Central Virginia. “It’s the riskiest but the highest reward.”
The Virginia Bio+Tech Park is seeking a new president and CEO to lead its strategic planning and outreach as well as Activation Capital, a nonprofit tied to the park. Roth will remain on staff and move into a chief operating officer role, according to a Richmond Times-Dispatch report. Roth has been president and CEO since 2013.
Entrepreneurs rely on funding help from federal programs, such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as state and regional sources.
Examples include:
The Virginia Research Investment Committee, which awards grants focused on commercialization of university research that is not limited to bioscience. Last year, Virginia Tech received $1.1 million to match funds for research on a device that will use low-energy electric fields to treat brain tumors.
Virginia Catalyst, formerly known as Virginia Biosciences Health Research Corp., which promotes health-related collaborations among state research universities and industry.
The Center for Innovative Technology, which awards GAP Funds as seed-stage equity investments in Virginia-based technology, clean-tech and life-science companies. Tympanogen and TypeZero are among beneficiaries of early seed funding. Embody, which was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop treatment for tendon and ligament injuries for the military, last year received GAP funding to develop technology to accelerate healing for sports medicine patients.
Universities also provide funding to help bring research to market. Virginia Commonwealth University in January announced creation of the Health Innovation Consortium, a three-year initiative with more than $7 million in funding that is intended to make the region a hub for the development of new health-care technology, says Nicole Monk, director of VCU Ventures.
While VCU Ventures supports startup activity in the university, the consortium will support collaboration beyond VCU and focus solely on health care, she says.
VCU Health will finance operations and support pre-seed and seed funds. The medical center also will serve as the “testing bed” to help an innovator determine “am I solving a problem worth solving?” Monk says.
Other universities have similar programs, such as the University of Virginia’s affiliation with the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Translational Partnership Program in Biomedical Engineering. The U.Va. partnership, the only Coulter program in the state, each year awards about $700,000 to six to eight translational research projects.
“They’re each so unique,” says David Chen, director of the U.Va. Coulter program. But the goal is the same — “science serving humanity and really helping move the needle of care.”
The grants help with “the really risky, first money in,” he says.
One Coulter beneficiary is Rivanna Medical, a Charlottesville-based company that produces an ultrasound guidance device designed to improve the success of epidural and spinal anesthesia.
Academic role
The TEConomy study underscores the importance of academic involvement in bioscience research.
In fiscal year 2016, Virginia research universities contributed $736.6 million to bioscience-related R&D in the state, more than half the total expenditures, according to the report. Another $377 million came from the National Institutes of Health in fiscal 2017, with bioscience venture capital investments totaling just over $305 million from 2014-17.
In a separate analysis for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and the Virginia Research Investment Committee last year, TEConomy found that, since the 2007-09 recession, the state’s research assets have underperformed in comparison with other states.
That study, which was broader than the biosciences report, highlighted the need for improving the state’s “innovation ecosystem” and bridging gaps in collaboration between university researchers and Virginia-based entrepreneurs.
According to the report, venture capital from 2010 to 2016 was flat in Virginia while rising nationally. And for overall research funding across industry, federal labs and universities, Virginia’s total fell by 6.3%, or nearly $500 million, from 2010 to 2015, while nationally total R&D activity increased 14.5% during the same time.
The report pointed to the life sciences as one of four strategic growth opportunities for Virginia, along with cyber and cybersecurity, integrated networking and data analytics, and “system of systems” engineering.
“Life sciences development in Virginia is still very much being defined through the commercialization of university research and the collaborations unfolding between academic medical centers and Virginia’s major hospital systems,” the TEConomy report says.
While the upside is significant, the report adds, “life sciences development is a marathon given the longtime horizons for new product development and one that must have sustained investment to succeed.”
Gary Warren is president and CEO of ivWatch, a company that develops technology to improve the safety of one of the most common invasive medical procedures: peripheral intravenous (IV) therapy.
While about 90% of hospitalized patients receive IV therapy, Warren says, the failure rate is as high as 50%. And the cause of failure in more than 20% of cases is a leak outside the intended vein into surrounding tissue.
The Hampton-based company’s ivWatch Model 400 is a noninvasive device cleared by the FDA to detect the leakage of a drug or fluid during therapy.
Virginia Business interviewed Warren via email to gain his perspective on what it took to develop a startup into a medical device manufacturer and biosensor technology company. Warren, who began his career as a research scientist in computational fluid dynamics at NASA Langley Research Center, says “there is no room for the ‘fake it till you make it’” mentality.
Virginia Business:What has helped ivWatch succeed? Warren: Solving problems and developing products in the medical field is incredibly difficult. The one underlying requirement for success in this field is the relentless pursuit of solving an unmet need in health care. It is a desire to right a wrong and never giving up.
This goes for the scientists, engineers, business professionals, investors and, most importantly, an innovative medical institution that will allow access to patients, data and clinicians.
Being passionate is mission critical. The expectations are extremely high and scrutinized for a breakthrough technology. All of this is compounded for first-to-market innovations, as well as designing and documenting to a standard, so your team has to be hungry.
VB:Describe your technology. Warren: ivWatch’s breakthrough technology monitors what is happening below the skin and into the tissue during drug/fluid delivery and can detect leakage within a few drops. It’s essentially “surveillance under the skin” with the ability to detect an event far before signs are visible to the human eye.
But we’re not stopping there. Biosensor development comes down to the science and depth of knowledge a company’s team has on interpreting and analyzing data. Right now, it’s about watching the IV, but we plan to leverage this technology and the amount of data we are able to collect and introduce new products using the IV site to watch a person’s overall health.
VB: How has ivWatch grown since it was launched? Warren: Since ivWatch was founded in late 2010, we’ve grown from a small group doing nothing but research and development — essentially an incubator startup type of company — to a company of nearly 40, including marketing, sales, manufacturing and clinical departments. We are addressing a huge unmet need and building a new market within the medical/health-care space. We are a Hampton Roads company with an international reach.
VB: What was an early challenge? Warren: The unique attributes of the medical-device industry require adherence to strict quality procedures and regular audits by governing agency bodies. It takes time to move from concept to commercialization, and the road was longer than anticipated.
We’ve conducted [tens of] thousands of monitoring hours through clinical trials and evaluations, been awarded patent grants across the globe and have secured steady funding to get to the stage where customers include world-class health facilities.
But in the beginning, we found out one very important thing — you can’t do testing on nonmobile objects for a technology that would be used on moving patients. One of our core, globally patented algorithms focuses on mitigating the effects of tissue blood volume changes during movement. It is an example of how we prospered where we almost failed.
VB: What’s on the horizon for your company? Warren: Our growth plan consists of organically expanding our business through continued development of our direct sales team for the U.S. pediatric and adult acute-care market. We have also [formed partnerships] to expand our reach into international pediatric and adult markets.
A focus this year is bringing more manufacturing in-house and bringing more high-tech jobs to the area. We’re looking at our areas of expertise and vertically integrating those areas by producing some of our own product components.
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“I think it’s increasing exponentially, almost by the month,” says Barbara D. Boyan, dean of VCU’s College of Engineering. “Richmond seems to have found its legs and is very focused on entrepreneurial activity.”
Horn-Ranney of Tympanogen says that she has found Virginia’s bioscience environment to be more collaborative and less competitive than the one she observed in the Northeast.