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75 Years of Achievement 29 Secondly, collaboration with business partners and across academic disciplines will undoubtedly be even more important than in years past. As a state, Connecticut has eagerly adopted a stronger appreciation for science, technology, engineering and math and the many opportunities those disciplines can bring to our state, our nation and our world. Our business expertise fits hand-in-hand with those opportunities, for even the greatest, life-changing idea won't come to fruition without a good business plan. We ask ourselves: how can we help that engineering student develop the next great invention? How can we design a business plan for a new cancer treatment? Our newest role is to partner with those who are changing the future, through invention and innovation, and serve as a collaborator on that journey. We are at the forefront of that change through the Connecticut Center for En- trepreneurship and Innovation (CCEI). Led by Management Professor Timothy B. Folta, the omas John and Bette Wolff Family Chair of Strategic Entrepre- neurship at UConn, CCEI heeds the statewide call for new medical technology and marketplace innovation. Its Accelerate UConn program, funded by the National Science Foundation, helps faculty, graduate students and entrepreneurs improve the commercial potential of technologies, even supplying start-up capital to get products and ideas to consumers, Folta said. e Center has numerous other initiatives and collaborations to advance those efforts. e foundation for all these exciting initiatives is the School's strong ties with local companies, said Lawrence Gramling, assistant professor and associate dean of undergraduate programs. "is is very much about relationship building," he said. UConn collaborates with the larger business community and in exchange, corpora- tions extend to our students the opportunity to learn outside the classroom. "ere is tremendous synergy in going out to work in any kind of a profession- al environment where whatever they studied is being used," said Gramling. Our alumni are 40,000-strong and many of them go out of their way—from providing scholarships to mentoring—to help our students on their career path. As our world has become more connected, so has the School's approach to edu- SVP Chief Risk and Chief Credit Officer John Bonora of First County Bank speaks on a panel at the 2015 Connecticut Risk Management Conference, which brings together industry professionals and faculty experts to discuss various aspects of risk. Connecticut's Tolland- based Macroscopic Solutions, a company started by Mark Smith '13 MS using $15,000 in Innovation Quest (iQ) prize money, manufactures the Macropod, a device that offers scientists a new, portable way to capture ultra-high-resolution images of just about anything. This extreme close-up of a flesh fly, for example, typically measuring between .16 and .9 inches in length, was captured at 5x magnification. Smith says that high-resolution, zoomed-in images like this significantly help with species identification, scientific communication, and education.