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You’ve heard of the Bermuda Triangle. A different sort of triangle, a “training triangle,” has developed in our “Good Life” area with the University of Florida, Santa Fe College and Santa Fe High School collaborating to train our children for the bioscience careers of the future. Their efforts are now highly visible with the opening of Santa Fe College’s new Alachua campus, the Perry Center for Emerging Technologies, and Santa Fe High School’s new state-of-the-art Science Building. Both will open for students this Fall. Together with UF’s workforce training program in Progress Corporate Park they are creating a pipeline of skilled workers for our local bioscience companies and others around the state. In 2003 the biotech world sat up and took notice when then Florida Governor Jeb Bush announced that San Diego’s highly respected Scripps Research Institute would open a second location in Florida. In short order other well known research institutes announced new Florida locations and the State is now one of the top ten biotech centers in the U.S.
Lost in all these announcements was the fact that Florida was already growing its own bioscience industry with significant help from the University of Florida. UF attracts more than half a billion research dollars annually and some of the research turns into new products and services. Business Week took admiring notice of this in 2007 with an article entitled “MIT, Caltech — And the Gators?” More than a dozen UF-related bioscience and technology companies have moved into Progress Corporate Park, a 205 acre campus-like technology park north of UF (www.progresscorporatepark.com) that is home to UF’s most successful spinout, RTI Biologics (Nasdaq: RTIX), and UF’s Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubation program www.biotech.ufl.org.
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Santa Fe High New Science Building |
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SFC Campus Under Construction |
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The Park is also home to the Center of Excellence in Regenerative Health Biotechnology (CERHB) which collaborated with SFC on an industrial biotechnology curriculum and with SFH and Marion High School on Florida’s first high school biotech curriculum. CERHB is also home to Workforce Florida’s Banner Center in Biotechnology, offering short certificate courses to the existing workforce. CERHB recently developed Master’s level courses for a UF degree program.
Santa Fe College’s Alachua campus will offer both two and four year biotech degrees as well as foundation courses. “It’s exciting to see SFC expanding to Alachua and be so close to the biotech companies that our students hope to work for” according to Dr. Kelly Gridley, SFC Dean for Emerging Technologies and Director, Biotechnology Programs.
Santa Fe High School’s Biotech Program Coordinator and Instructor, June Camerlengo, agrees. “Our proximity to the companies means our students can visit them, do job shadowing, career interviews and even work on projects with them. “We’re already talking to Pasteuria Bioscience, a company in the Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator, about a possible collaboration that would benefit our students and the company.” Santa Fe High’s Biotechnology core can start in 9th grade. “These programs cover structure and function of DNA, cell processes, how to make proteins, etc. and use of basic lab equipment”, says Carmerlengo. Students who are not normally zoned to SFHS may attend under the district’s “choice” program. “Biotechnology has lots of applications — medical, biological, pharmaceutical, environmental, chemical, agricultural, engineering and forensic sciences. Our students can become technicians, technologists, scientists and researchers.” With the training pipeline we’ve got here now they can do this without even leaving the area!
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