In a move that borrows a page from Intel’s “Rock Stars of Engineering” advertising campaign, a San Diego non-profit group is organizing a program that will bring the aspiring rock stars of San Diego’s life sciences industry into local classrooms.
The pilot program, funded by a $100,000 grant from the Cambridge, MA-based Biogen Idec Foundation, will recruit entrepreneurial founders of early stage biotech companies to talk about their breakthrough innovations and why they started their companies. The idea is to get young people excited about studying science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), says Duane Roth, who heads Connect, the 25-year-old non-profit organization that supports technology and entrepreneurship in San Diego.
“So many things have been tried before,” says Roth, who frets that American students just don’t relate to STEM education or see the career possibilities. “We think young people—7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th-graders—relate more to products than to lectures.” By arranging to have entrepreneurs talk about their technologies, Roth says, students can grasp how inventions gets commercialized, and what it takes to bring a product to market.
One early recruit, for example, is Jack DeFranco, CEO of San Diego-based Targeson, which invents ultrasound contrast agents used to detect disease at the molecular level, before someone who is ill even shows any symptoms.
The speaker program is reminiscent of last year’s Intel ad campaign that has swooning workplace groupies surrounding a wonkish, middle-aged man as a screen graphic reads, “Ajay Bhatt, co-inventor of USB,” which is followed by a message that says, “Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars.” (An actor was portraying the real Ajay Bhatt.) I’m also reminded of a photo spread in GQ magazine last year of the “Rockstars of Science” that paired Eric Topol, the prominent Scripps’ cardiologist and translational medicine researcher, with real-life singers like Seal, Sheryl Crow, and Josh Groban.
I think it is a great idea,” says Larry Bock, a longtime life sciences venture investor in San Diego who heard about the pilot program in March. As executive director of the non-profit USA Science & Engineering Festival, which is scheduled to take place this fall in Washington, D.C., Bock has focused much of his time on
