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byline: Tim Thornton

New Appalachian School of Law dean faces challenges

Retired Supreme Court of Virginia Justice Elizabeth McClanahan grew up in the Buchanan County community of Garden Creek, about 12 miles from Grundy.

“Grundy was the big city,” says McClanahan, who retired from the state’s highest court on Sept. 1. “It’s the county seat. It’s the only town in the county.”

Grundy’s also the home of the Appalachian School of Law (ASL), where McClanahan has been the dean since Sept. 2.

McClanahan came home after a prestigious career serving as Virginia’s chief deputy attorney general, a judge on the Court of Appeals of Virginia, vice rector of William & Mary, chairman of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, and a lawyer specializing in gas and oil issues. She’s also a senior advisor to the dean and an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin School of Business and has taught at ASL since 2011.

Passing through Shortt Gap into Buchanan County, McClanahan says, “You kind of go down into the mountains and they wrap all around you. I just feel like I’m being hugged.”

But McClanahan knows not everyone shares those feelings. Appalachians educated outside the region rarely return to live there because of a shortage of private and public-sector jobs, especially those that pay well.

“The best way to keep people in Appalachia is to educate them there,” McClanahan says. “In small towns, lawyers are community leaders. They’re on school boards. They’re on boards of supervisors. They’re in Rotary. They’re in Kiwanis. That’s another part of our mission: to make sure we still have community service leaders in Appalachia.”

Appalachia is also a place that needs lawyers. Across Virginia, there’s a lawyer for every 353 people. In the seven counties of far Southwest Virginia, the ratio is 1-to-745. Before ASL was founded, though, it was 1-to-915.

The Appalachian School of Law is young, having graduated its first class in 2000, and small. Enrollment was 164 in the fall 2019. It’s housed in what was Grundy High School, then Grundy Junior High, a Great Depression-era edifice that resembles the kinds of schools that federal works programs built all across the country.

ASL provides 48 jobs and an annual direct economic impact of $5.6 million in a county with roughly 21,000 residents. In an average year, the school’s students contribute more than 18,500 hours of service at the school’s monthly free law clinic and other organizations.

McClanahan faces another major challenge: the American Bar Association’s tightened law school accreditation requirements. At least 75% of graduates now must pass a bar exam within two years instead of five. ASL’s class of 2017 met the requirement, but only 65% of the 2018 class has passed the state bar exam so far. ASL needs two more graduates to pass by February.

McClanahan says she’s “laser-focused” on the issue, working to improve the school’s programs and its students. She’s raised money to offer more scholarships, which has allowed the school to raise the Law School Admission Test scores of the most recently admitted class.

“We’re continuing to try to move those LSAT numbers up,” McClanahan says. “We’re recruiting heavily people who have better LSAT scores.”

Believing that specialized training gives students an advantage — and gives the school a recruiting advantage — ASL has added certificates in cybersecurity policy and management to its existing certificates in natural resources law and criminal law. The cybersecurity certificates require online courses through Virginia Tech’s Pamplin School of Business.

ASL is working toward building a certificate program with Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering and the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine. The law school and Virginia Tech are hosting a pipeline symposium next year, and they’re developing a class built around what engineers should know about the law and what lawyers should know about engineering.

ASL is also working on “3+3” programs that would guarantee some regional college students admission to the law school if they meet certain criteria, allowing them to earn a bachelor’s degree and a law degree in six years rather than seven.

McClanahan has put the connections she’s built over the years to work at ASL, attracting an impressive list of lecturers, speakers and teachers to campus. Retired Judge Larry Elder, with whom she served on the state Court of Appeals, is a lecturer, and two State Corporation Commission judges co-taught utilities law with McClanahan last semester. Supreme Court of Virginia Chief Justice Donald W. Lemons spoke to students and Justice Cleo Powell, the first African American woman on the state’s high court, has agreed to be the school’s Sutin Lecturer and to serve as the school’s liaison to Virginia’s historically black colleges and universities.

“We’re a fourth-tier law school. That’s what we’ll be — and frankly that’s fine with us,” McClanahan says. “But hopefully we will have these niches that are marketable programs. But more importantly, we want to educate people in the most excellent way and be selective about the people that we have.”

New Appalachian School of Law dean faces challenges

Buchanan County native Elizabeth McClanahan became the dean of the Grundy-based Appalachian School of Law in September, one day after retiring as a Virginia Supreme Court justice.

She immediately faced a challenge: the American Bar Association’s tightened law school accreditation requirements. At least 75% of graduates now must pass a bar exam within two years instead of five. ASL’s class of 2017 met the requirement, but only 65% of the 2018 class has passed the bar so far. ASL needs two more graduates to pass by February.

McClanahan says she’s “laser-focused” on the issue, working to improve the school’s programs and students. She’s raised money for more scholarships, a move that has helped boost incoming students’ average LSAT scores.

Before ASL’s founding in 2000, the ratio of lawyers to residents in far Southwest Virginia was 1-to-915. That statistic has improved to 1-to-745 but remains behind the statewide ratio of one lawyer for every 353 people. That’s another focus for McClanahan.

“The best way to keep people in Appalachia is to educate them there,” she says. “In small towns, lawyers are community leaders. They’re on school boards. They’re on boards of supervisors. They’re in Rotary. They’re in Kiwanis. That’s another part of our mission, to make sure we still have community service leaders in Appalachia.”

ASL has 164 students this fall, and all are engaged in community service. They log an average 18,500 volunteer hours annually at a free law clinic and other organizations.

Justice Cleo Powell, the first African American woman on the Virginia Supreme Court, has agreed to be an ASL lecturer and to serve as a liaison to the commonwealth’s historically black colleges and universities. Building upon an existing partnership with Virginia Tech’s Pamplin School of Business, McClanahan is working toward agreements with other Tech schools for certificate programs. She’s also collaborating with other colleges to allow students to earn bachelor’s and law degrees in six years instead of seven.

“We’re a fourth-tier law school. That’s what we’ll be — and frankly, that’s fine with us,” McClanahan says. “But hopefully we will have these niches that are marketable programs. But more importantly, we want to educate people in the most excellent way and be selective about the people that we have.”  

Despite setbacks, Mountain Valley Pipeline inches forward

The Mountain Valley Pipeline is three years behind schedule, $2 billion over budget and has lost four required permits it needs to continue construction. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stopped work on the pipeline to review a lawsuit over one of those permits, and another suit over environmental violations ended with MVP paying a $2.15 million civil penalty.

Nevertheless, the proposed 303-mile, 42-inch natural gas pipeline, which would begin in northern West Virginia and cross Virginia’s Giles, Montgomery, Franklin and Pittsylvania counties, will likely be completed — eventually — according to analyst Roger Conrad, founder and editor of Conrad’s Utility Investor.

“The economics of the pipeline for the developers is still pretty good,” Conrad says. “The pipeline is primarily, like the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, to feed utilities. … Those are pretty solid customers to have.”

Those utilities are affiliated with some of the pipeline’s owners — NextEra Capital Holdings, Con Edison Transmission, WGL Midstream, EQM Midstream Partners and RGC Midstream. Pittsburgh-based natural gas limited partnership EQM is set to operate the pipeline.

The original cost estimate for the pipeline, which was supposed to begin service last year, was $3.5 billion. The most recent estimates have it opening in 2021 and costing up to $5.5 billion.

“The weak link of the MVP is probably EQM Midstream,” Conrad says. “It’s possible that if they were not able to keep up their end of funding it, that you’d see NextEra or one of the other partners step up and put more money in.”

Consolidated Edison capped its funding in November, and EQM, which reported a $10.5 million loss in the third quarter of 2019, plans to cover $86 million of the shortfall, increasing its investment in the pipeline to $2.7 billion.

Diana Christopulos, a member of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy President’s Leadership Council and president of the Blue Ridge Land Conservancy, questions the need for the MVP and has fought the pipeline for years. She admits the odds favor the MVP, but she doesn’t think its completion is inevitable.

“The question becomes how long do they want to keep throwing this money around and how long do the investors want to keep loaning them money?” she says. “It is death by a thousand cuts. You never know when you’ve got to the thousandth one because they’re little.”

Excella Extension Center plans expansion

It’s a classic conundrum. Software developers can’t get a job unless they have experience, but they can’t get experience if they can’t get a job. For the past decade, the Excella Extension Center at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center in Blacksburg has bridged that gap, training Virginia Tech students as they work on projects for Excella clients.

“We’re really trying to un-‘Catch 22’ the system,” says Excella co-founder and partner Steve Cooper. “What we do there is pretty exciting, and what we’re about to do is even more exciting.”

What they’re about to do is expand the project in a big way. “We’re actually spinning off and carving out this extension center model into its own company that I will run,” Cooper says. “It will provide talent and virtual workforce to not just Excella but to other employers. So we’re working to put alliances in place with other employers who want us to run their talent pipeline.”

About 80 students have come through the program since it began in 2009, Cooper says, and 30 of them have gone to work at Excella, a 300-person, $70 million Arlington consulting firm that advises clients on advanced data and analytics, agile transportation, modernization and digital service delivery. Its clients include National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, the Compressed Gas Association and the Department of Homeland Security.

This year, Vault, a website that ranks businesses, rated the Extension Center fourth-highest in tech and engineering internships, fifth in employment prospects and ninth in career development.

The spinoff company, set to open by the end of this year, will be based at the Corporate Research Center, but Cooper is working on plans to expand the concept to other campuses, including Radford University, Howard University and the University of North Carolina. Like the students at Tech, they’ll work 10 to 15 hours a week during the academic year and full time in the summer, in teams supervised by an Excella software engineer.

“They’re learning the best practices of software engineering because they’re building software for our clients,” Cooper says. “What the students are learning is how to be effective software engineers in the real world so that by the time they graduate, they’re ready to hit the ground running and they’ve been trained not only in academic software development, but real hands-on software development practices.”

High-powered marketing initiative InvestSWVA launches in coal country

InvestSWVA, a public-private Southwest Virginia marketing initiative launched in September, is about more than marketing — because sometimes it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

“This is absolutely leveraging relationships,” says Will Payne, project leader for InvestSWVA and managing partner of Coalfield Strategies LLC, an economic development consulting firm he formed in April. “This is the value of Hunton, the value of members of our team who have relationships, and we’re going to leverage those relationships to get in meetings with decision makers. It’s rolling up your sleeves and attacking our goals.”

“Hunton” is Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, Virginia’s second-largest law firm. InvestSWVA team member Todd Haymore heads the firm’s global economic development, commerce and government relations group, after having served two state administrations as secretary of commerce and trade, and agriculture and forestry. Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott, and Del. Israel O’Quinn, R-Washington, are on the team, and Payne was recently chief deputy of the state Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy.

With a timeline of two years, InvestSWVA has $800,000 in funding from various sources, including the Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission and Georgia-based internet service provider Point Broadband.

Working with local, regional and state economic development organizations, InvestSWVA is working to make the most of GO Virginia, the statewide business-led initiative that encourages private-sector growth and new jobs via state incentives. The team also aims to market the region as a “hotbed of energy innovation, and particularly renewable energy innovation,” Payne says.

Already, InvestSWVA has partnered with the Northern Virginia Technology Council to promote remote employment with the NVTC’s 1,000 member companies and organizations.

“It would be really nice to think there would be so many successes and victories in a two-year period that you could wrap it up in two years and say ‘mission accomplished’ and move on,” Haymore says, but he expects this project to be longer term.

“I believe that the things that we will generate … will grant enough momentum, and this will be something that will last beyond the two years that are being discussed now, because the things that you do today on behalf of a locality or a region sometimes don’t come to fruition in these nice prescriptive timeframes that you try to live your life by and conduct your business by.”

Brilliant diversity

Students at Northern Virginia Community College aren’t much different than they were when he started teaching 30 years ago, says history professor Charles Errico.

But then again, they are. 

“They all tend to be facing enormous obstacles. That has not changed,” Errico says. “What is different is that many of our students are visual learners. Many of them use technology. … They get most of their information from the internet, and so you have to speak their language. You have to use technology to reach them a little more effectively.”

The oldest members of Generation Z will turn 22 this year, putting them firmly in the traditional college-age bracket. Those first Gen Zers were born the same year as Netflix. They were just 10 years old when Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone. They have grown up in a very digital world.

“They’re online all the time,” says Errico, who is chairman of the Virginia Community College System’s Chancellor’s Faculty Advisory Committee. “They’re on their phones all the time … so they’re very comfortable in using the technology.”

Educators in turn have been becoming more adept at using technology to teach these digital natives.

Digital classrooms
At the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Human Development, “a virtual classroom interface” allows teacher candidates to practice in simulated classroom situations long before they’re in charge of a real-life classroom. “And they get to do this from the comfort of their own home,” says Julie Cohen, assistant professor of curriculum, instruction and special education at the Curry School. “They do everything over Zoom,” a video communications platform.

Students react to what they see onscreen. Coaches interrupt to evaluate and give advice. The students try again.

“We found it to be really effective at getting them [to perform] better more quickly,” Cohen says. “But it’s also engaging for them in a totally different kind of way. The technology, I think, meets their needs to be able to do things from their living room. There is this kind of desire to be able to work from wherever, to be able to complete assignments and do things from a distance.”

U.Va.’s Curry School has used the simulator for three years, Cohen says, but this is the first year every candidate will take part. When Cohen demonstrated the simulator for introductory classes this year, students “just came alive,” she says. “As soon as the digital classroom came on the screen, they took out their phones. They started taking pictures.”

The simulator also lets students lead virtual parent-teacher conferences. Traditionally, they wouldn’t lead a conference until they’ve become teachers.

The simulator has other advantages, too, according to Cohen: “They’re not practicing on real kids. The analogy we make is flight simulators. People don’t learn to fly in real planes.”

Change is a certainty
Kim Filer, director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, says pedagogy is evolving all across campuses.

“Most of our faculty have moved away from the stand-and-deliver lecture,” she says. “They spend a lot of time thinking through how do they actually get students to process the information and become active learners, even in a very large lecture hall.”

That’s not just because students are changing. The working world they’re graduating into is changing too, and it’s likely to continue to change throughout those students’ careers.

“We’re really challenging our students to get comfortable with uncertainty,” Filer says, “and understand the world isn’t as linear as it is presented in a book or in a traditional lab report.”

Students not only need to become comfortable with uncertainty; they need to navigate their way through it.

“The bottom line is, we’re training young people for a world that we don’t know what it’s going to look like,” says Thanasis Rikakis. “That’s a critical difference between now and say, 40 years ago. We, of course, need to teach specifics … but we also need to teach our students — we need to give them space to develop their own paths.”

The keys for effectively educating Gen Z, Rikakis says, are three C’s and one S: co-creation (programs partly structured by faculty and partly designed by students); collaboration (working in diverse teams); cross-cutting (working across disciplines and across sectors); and sustainability (focusing on solutions that balance technology, business, people and the planet).

A professor of bioengineering and performing arts at Virginia Tech, Rikakis is also the founding chair of the Calhoun Honors Discovery Program and the Calhoun Center for Higher Education Innovation. The program, made possible through a donation from Tech alum David Calhoun, is experimenting with new ways of teaching, learning and collaborating across 11 disciplines, ranging from  business management to computational modeling and data analytics to electrical and computer engineering, and smart and sustainable cities.

It’s important, Rikakis says, to involve business, government and nonprofits in teaching so students can connect their university-gained knowledge to the real world. It’s a world where students will need a different attitude as well as a different set of skills and increased flexibility to succeed.

“It used to be, 30 years ago, if you were a musician or a mechanical engineer, primarily, you would just go ahead and work with other musicians or mechanical engineers,” Rikakis says. “It’s not the case anymore.

We’re saying to our students, if you don’t have the policy knowledge, the humanities knowledge, the arts knowledge in the room, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to develop things that have unintended consequences, and they see that from the beginning.”

Next-gen teaching
Students in the Calhoun program have a traditional major, but they learn by working to solve real-world problems in teams of other students, industry partners and faculty. When students realize they need more information to collaborate with members of their team from other disciplines, they can take one-credit study modules. Much of the learning in these modules is done online, but the modules also include weekly in-person meetings with faculty. Students can revisit the modules to learn more about a particular discipline, even after graduation.

“After a while,” Rikakis says, “you can’t even tell what is your disciplinary education, what is your general education, and what is your experiential learning. They’re one thing.”

The structure helps students develop the habits of lifelong learners. It also aims to do more than prepare people for employment.

“If, as a university, all we do is prepare good employees, not only are we failing our students, we’re failing our society,” Rikakis says.

The school’s leaders, he adds, emphasize that “this is not about you making a quick buck or being a good employee. It’s about how to understand this idea of developing the technology, the business, the people and the planet together — and that is a very complex personal and professional development paradigm. You don’t understand those four things together unless you’re developing both personally and professionally.”

The most important outcome, Rikakis says, the main goal, is “graduating a generation that understands the best solutions to complex problems lie in a negotiated space. They don’t lie in binaries. They don’t lie in out-shouting the other person, or shutting down the other person’s difference. They lie in being able to come [into] a complicated space where the majority of the things you’re hearing you’ve not heard before, you’re not comfortable with, and learning to be comfortable with the difference and learning to be comfortable in that space and negotiating something that works for all.

“I think, as a society, we need that to be sustainable. And creating a negotiated space between brilliant but different people is exactly what we’re aiming for.”

Higher education charts

Community supports miners stranded by Blackjewel bankruptcy

In 2017, West Virginia-based Blackjewel was the country’s sixth-largest coal producer, with more mining permits than any other coal company in the nation, but on July 1, Blackjewel abruptly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and closed 30 mines. More than 1,400 people were suddenly jobless, including 430 in Southwest Virginia.

Their last paychecks also bounced, and with the company’s assets tied up in bankruptcy court, it’s not clear when miners will go back to work or get paid.

Mines closing or laying off workers is far from unusual in Southwest Virginia, but the suddenness of the Blackjewel closures and bankruptcy is out of the ordinary, and help for the miners and their families has come from several sources — businesses, the state government, community colleges and many others.

“The company,” explains Rachel Patton, director of business services at the Southwest Virginia Workforce Development Board, “is supposed to issue a WARN notice and either give their employees 90 days’ notice or give them 90 days of severance pay. Typically, when we get a WARN notice, we really like to go onsite to an employer, if they will let us, and start providing these services before the separation date. Obviously, that couldn’t happen here. … It really put a lot of these families in a very unstable situation.”

In July, the Virginia Employment Commission held rapid response events across the region, making it easy for miners to sign up for unemployment benefits, Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as well as resources from local social services and community colleges. The Richard and Leslie Gilliam Foundation, created by Southwest Virginia natives who made their fortune in coal, contributed $250,000, providing a $2,000 stipend for each out-of-work miner in Virginia.

In August, Blackjewel’s properties were auctioned off, and the U.S. bankruptcy court in the Southern District of West Virginia approved bids, although the federal government must give its OK before the purchases are finalized. Tennessee-based Kopper Glo LLC successfully bid on the Black Mountain and Lone Mountain mines on the Virginia-Kentucky line. It has offered $1 million in compensation for displaced miners, whom Kopper Glo says will be put back to work as soon as possible.

But many people are moving on, and more than 57 former mine workers have already found new work through two job fairs sponsored by the workforce development board, Patton says, including 50 jobs in the coal industry.

“There were coal mines that were calling us that were going, ‘We really want to give these folks a job.’”

Landos Biopharma’s promising anti-inflammation drug moves into Phase II trials

With $60 million of financing from a group of investors announced in August, Blacksburg-based Landos Biopharma has moved into Phase II trials of a drug that may dramatically change the lives of people suffering from Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

Landos chairman and CEO Josep Bassaganya-Riera, director of Virginia Tech’s Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory, says BT-11 could be on the market by 2023.

“To develop a drug in the U.S., it takes about $2 [billion] to $3 billion. Sometimes it takes 10, 15 years,” Bassaganya-Riera says. “BT-11 has been very accelerated.”

Landos was founded in 2017. BT-11 completed Phase I trials, in which the drug was administered to healthy subjects to prove it is safe, within 18 months of its development. Phase II involves 195 subjects and should produce results next year. Phase III trials, testing the drug in a larger group of subjects, must follow before Landos can apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for final approval.

Most people treated for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis — inflammatory bowel diseases with no known cure — receive injections or infusions that suppress patients’ immune systems to reduce inflammation. BT-11, in part because it is taken orally, targets specific inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract and doesn’t have the same broad effect on patients’ immune systems, which can leave them vulnerable to other illnesses, Bassaganya-Riera says.

The process behind BT-11’s testing is nearly as innovative as the drug itself.

Using computer models, researchers simulate experiments before they conduct experiments in the real world, eliminating a lot of trial and error.

Bassaganya-Riera, the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council’s 2017 Innovator of the Year, describes himself as a serial entrepreneur. He is president and CEO of two other companies: BioTherapeutics, a nutraceutical business, and Pervida, a group of beverages that are advertised as having digestive and anti-inflammatory benefits.

Landos also has other drugs in various stages of development targeting lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and type I diabetes.

“We are very excited about BT-11,” he says. “It’s the first drug we’ve brought forward. However, Landos is not a one-trick pony.”

FreightCar America leaving Roanoke

Roanoke Mayor Sherman Lea was surprised to receive a WARN notice announcing that FreightCar America is closing its Roanoke shops.

“We thought things were going well and they said they were,” Lea says. “We did not see it coming.”

Chicago-based FreightCar was talking about expanding operations there as recently as last year, searching for a site with rail access and room for 1 million square feet of manufacturing space. Now the company plans to close its Roanoke shops, shifting production of the rail cars to its Cherokee, Alabama, plant. More than 200 people will lose their jobs in phases, from September through November. That’s just over 1% of the Roanoke Valley’s manufacturing jobs.

“It’s not transformational,” Roanoke Regional Partnership Executive Director Beth Doughty says of the closure’s effect on the local economy. “It’s transformational for those 200 people.”

According to Roanoke Economic Development Director Robert Ledger, “The fortunate thing is these workers are amazing, hard-working, super-skilled people, and we have other manufacturers in the area that could reap the benefits of FreightCar America leaving.”

FreightCar America’s Roanoke plant has had several rounds of layoffs since the company took over the facility in 2005. Each time, Ledger says, laid-off FreightCar America workers had little trouble finding work.

“They have such in-demand skills in the community — welding, machinists, etc., that they are snapped up rather quickly,” Ledger says.

The median salary for Roanoke Valley welders is $42,580, according to the Virginia Economic Development Partnership. Machinists’ median pay is $44,359, and the city’s median household income is $41,483.

Even while announcing the closing, Jim Meyer, FreightCar America’s president and CEO, praised Roanoke workers, saying some will be offered other FreightCar America jobs. “Our people at Roanoke have consistently performed above all expectations,” Meyer said in a news release. “We are extremely thankful for everything they have given the company.”

That performance could not overcome the company’s desire to cut costs, however. FreightCar America expects to save about $5 million annually with the consolidation.

“It’s a new world out there now,” Lea says. “We’ve got to recognize that corporate decisions are being made daily and to be ready for these types of events.”

City and state officials got busy as soon as the WARN notice arrived, Lea says, and “we’re going to try to do what we can to find them work.”

Bringing the world to their doorstep

The Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, a Roanoke-based partnership between Carilion Clinic and Virginia Tech, is busy building the future, but it’s making substantial economic contributions right now. In an area where the average income is $44,170, the institute’s average salary is more than $92,000. Most of the people earning those salaries don’t come to Roanoke alone.

“That’s … what I kind of call the shadow economy,” says Michael Friedlander, the institute’s executive director. “We have this second wave of affiliated family members or partners with people that come in, and they often bring a lot to Roanoke. They’ll bring their own businesses or they bring their own expertise that works for another business. That’s, I think, very powerful.”

The Fralin Biomedical Research Institute marries the region’s largest university, Virginia Tech, and the region’s largest employer, Carilion Clinic, a nonprofit health-care provider. Carilion has 13,230 employees working at 225 sites throughout much of Southwest Virginia. It had revenues of $1.8 billion in 2018.

The research institute is also a marriage of the two largest forces driving the Roanoke and New River Valley region’s economy: health care and technology.

That technology takes many forms, including long-distance cybersecurity services, such as 1901 Group’s work for federal agencies, and advanced manufacturing, including the Volvo truck assembly plant in Dublin. 1901 Group plans to break ground Aug. 14 on a 44,000-square-foot building in Virginia Tech’s Corporate Research Center that will house nearly 600 new employees by 2021. In July, Volvo announced plans to build a 350,000-square-foot building and add nearly 800 employees by 2025.

Meanwhile, the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute is about nine months away from the scheduled opening of a new 140,000-square-foot building where about 400 people will be working by 2027.

It takes a while to find, recruit and hire the kind of people the institute needs, according to Friedlander.

“Frankly, it’s about establishing a really exciting cadre of people,” he says. “You don’t want to bring in everybody at once. You want to bring in some people, see how those teams develop, look for the next best fit. You know there’s a learning curve as you go forward … deciding strategically about the next people you want to bring in.”

Each team is different in size and makeup, but the team working with Warren Bickel, whom Friedlander recruited from the University of Arkansas for Health Sciences, is representative.

“He’s one of these senior people, already had several grants and brought a couple of people with him,” Friedlander says. “But then he ended up hiring quite a few.”

Bickel’s team of about 30 includes around a half-dozen people with doctoral degrees, Friedlander says, and they came primarily from out of the area. The bulk of the rest of the team, he says, was hired locally. Graduate students who work on the teams as part of their training also earn some salary — nearly $30,000 each annually in addition to their tuition, according to Friedlander.

‘Off and running’
Sarah Snider did her postdoctoral work on Bickel’s team. Her group developed diagnostic surveys based on behavioral economic theory to predict how likely a person is to relapse into substance use. Now Snider is a senior research associate at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and the CEO of BEAM Diagnostics. The company is developing the diagnostic surveys with the help of a $285,000 Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer federal grant and a $300,000 federal grant from the National Institutes of Health.

BEAM Diagnostics was also part of the second cohort that last fall entered the Roanoke-based Regional Acceleration and Mentoring Program, a technology business accelerator program that is a joint venture of Virginia Western College, Roanoke city and the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council. 

“And now they’re off and running,” Friedlander says.

BEAM Diagnostics is one of five companies that have been spun out of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute so far, but sometimes companies come to the institute. BRAINbox Solutions, for instance, has developed a blood test to determine the severity of brain injuries.

“One of the great needs in the country and worldwide, for that matter, is accurate, precise and repeatable measures that predict if someone truly has a brain injury and how bad the brain injury is and what their prognosis will be,” Friedlander says.

The early results seem good, but BRAINbox needs to validate those results in a much larger study. BRAINbox turned to the institute to help run that larger test.

“The FDA was so impressed with their preliminary data [that] they gave them what’s called breakthrough status, which accelerates the process to allow this to happen very quickly in a nationwide test,” Friedlander says. “That’s pretty exciting because it means the people looking at the data believe there is something there.”

Formula for the future
While the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and its partners are working to launch medical breakthroughs and the companies that will profit from them, 1901 Group is working to bring more work to the relatively rural New River Valley.

The company’s vision, says Brandon Walsh, senior vice president for partner relations, is to handle routine IT activities remotely in a rural area that has access to talent, a high quality of life and an affordable cost of living. When the formula works, customers receive IT services at a relatively low cost performed by a stable work force, since there are fewer potential poachers to lure employees away.

There are other benefits, too. Blacksburg is close enough to Washington, D.C., for people to travel between the two fairly easily and quickly, but far enough away that if something disrupted operations in D.C., work could continue in Blacksburg.

“I think it is a formula for the future, especially for the public sector,” Walsh says. “You need U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and I think the rural sourcing is really a win-win.”

1901 Group is even open to hiring people if they don’t have an IT background (one manager is a former welder). But the steady flow of graduates from Virginia Tech, Radford University and New River Community College provides a pipeline of tech talent that fuels the company.

International business center
It’s a pipeline that Pulaski County Administrator Jonathan Sweet also wants to tap into.

“In our front door is Radford. In our living room is New River Community College, and in our side yard, or our back door, is Virginia Tech,” Sweet says. “I don’t know of another community that is better positioned, with available real estate, with infrastructure and utility … all of these pipelines of talent literally plugged into it, and community willingness to be aggressive and creative in growing and diversifying our economy.”

The largest Volvo truck plant in the world with its 3,500 employees is the dominant factor in Pulaski’s economy, but Sweet wants people to know building trucks isn’t his community’s only skill, or the only business his community is interested in.

“We’re looking at everything,” Sweet says. “We’re the center for advanced manufacturing in Southwest Virginia, but we’re also the center of international business.”

The county of 35,000 people is home to international companies from Sweden, Australia, Colombia, Poland, Mexico, Canada, Germany and Brazil. The county is working to encourage startups, grow its knowledge-based sector, improve workforce development and build more residential projects. Voters recently passed a referendum to finance a new consolidated middle school. Sweet says the residential projects are particularly vital.

“What we see is a lot of residential property in Pulaski and Pulaski County being renovated or retrofitted for millennial living and young professional living, which is what we consider the foundation to be able to attract and grow our knowledge-based industry sector,” he says. “You call other communities and they may start with something else, but what’s important to us is that we have housing and quality of life for millennials.”

Pulaski is drawing tech entrepreneurs and grad students from Virginia Tech who have found housing much more affordable than in Blacksburg, which is about a 30-minute commute away.

A new ‘tribe’ in town
Young professionals are also drawn to Pulaski by the opportunity to put their own imprint on the town.

“They’re in a community that’s not completely shaped yet,” Sweet says, “so they’re becoming a part of shaping their community. It’s very attractive for millennials because they have a desire, an innate desire, to be contributors, to do something, not just philanthropic, but to do something meaningful and tangible.”

And changes are already happening in Pulaski, where experienced developers and investors are working alongside the new generation.

Downtown, across from the courthouse, longtime Pulaski entrepreneur Steven Critchfield’s company, West Main Development, is renovating two 120-year-old buildings into a $1.6 million, mixed-use commercial and residential project.

It will house a New Orleans-style eatery and a virtual reality studio — both of which are ventures being started by a group of nine to 10 local millennial entrepreneurs. Nicknamed “The Tribe,” most of them are in their 20s, and they own more than 30 local properties, about a third of which are appraised at more than $1 million apiece.

Another local company owned by Critchfield, MOVA Technologies, has developed a system that can capture and recycle pollutants from sources such as  
fossil fuels and agricultural livestock. Critchfield hopes to open MOVA’s first manufacturing plant somewhere in Southwest Virginia before the end of the year.

Also a force in Pulaski is area businessman David Hagan, who during the last five years has invested more than $9 million in bringing his minor-league baseball franchise to town. That total includes acquiring and redeveloping the town’s historic Calfee Park, where the team, the Pulaski Yankees, plays. Hagan’s business interests range from car dealerships to hotels.

His son, Mopar Funny Car drag racer Matt Hagan, operates the largest hemp farm in Virginia in next-door Montgomery County.

Sweet is interested in hemp, too. It could help the county’s agricultural sector and lead to a new business for the county, industrial-scale hemp processing.

Meanwhile, Sweet says, all the available young talent locating in Pulaski, combined with land that’s practically free by Northern Virginia standards, is beginning to attract serious interest from IT companies.

“It’s as exciting a time as I have seen in Southwest Virginia,” he says, “and I’ve been working in the region for 20 years.”