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2015 | Doing Business in Connecticut 27 Education, Research & Technology Schooled in innovation Strong ties binding education, research and technology unleash extraordinary results By Theresa Sullivan Barger W hen Yale University and UConn advertise a job opening for faculty, researchers and administra- tors, the pool of candidates gets stronger with each passing year. e state's colleges and universities have established centers, programs and partnerships to foster and fuel re- search and economic development, and the investment of capital and talent is paying off. Consider: • Yale is one of the top 10 National Institutes of Health-funded research institutions. • Start-up companies incubated at Yale have raised $700 mil- lion in venture capital, bringing $5 billion in equity to the state. • Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, a university department that "helps entrepreneurs and innovators at Yale start scalable new ventures with programs, workshops, events and funding," is actively working with 80 companies that have raised over $135 million and created more than 350 jobs. • CaroGen Corp., founded in 2012 by a pair of Yale pathology researchers, has announced it will establish a lab at UConn's Technol- ogy Incubation Program in Farmington. • UConn has been selected as a National Science Foundation I-Corps site; the program fosters entrepreneurship that leads to the commercialization of technology. • UConn plans to build, by 2017, a state-funded, 114,000-square-foot inaugural building in its technology park, known as the Innovative Partnership Building, with space devoted to labs and specialized equipment for industry scientists and entrepreneurs who will work side-by-side with UConn researchers. • In anticipation of the Tech Park/IPB opening, several in- dustry partnerships have been developed. For example, a team from UConn formed a $25 million partnership with FEI, the foremost electron microscopy manufacturer worldwide, to establish a state- of-the-art center for microscopy and materials characterization. is industry-sponsored center joins six others that are anticipated to move into the IPB, along with companies that will rent space as ten- ants and collaborate with UConn students and faculty. Just as the architects of these initiatives had expected, these in- vestments are igniting economic growth in other industries. "is place [New Haven] is really amazingly different in terms Continued on page 28 > Bruce Liang, M.D., interim dean for the UConn School of Medicine and director of the Pat and Jim Calhoun Cardiology Center, says The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine is fueling a critical mass of research and innovation talent that is strengthening the state as a center for biomedical research. PHOTO/UCONN HEALTH