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Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The Mover
URI president Dooley aims to boost IP creation and translation
By Marc Songini, Special to Mass High Tech
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Although the University of Rhode Island is in the smallest state in the country, its new president David Dooley has some big ambitions to improve education and to move the school’s intellectual property to the marketplace.
“The University of Rhode Island can play a more direct role in using research to assist both the creation of new companies and the success of existing companies,” he said. To that end, last May, the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education appointed Dooley as the replacement for outgoing president Robert Carothers, who had occupied the seat for 18 years. Dooley had previously been the provost and vice president of academic affairs at Montana State University in Bozeman.
“There are a lot of similarities,” he said of the two institutions. “They are both land-grant universities with strong programs in science, engineering and a variety of other areas,” he said. The relative sizes are similar: Montana State has just over 12,000 undergraduate and graduate students, compared to URI’s 15,900. The cultures and academic concentrations at both places are also comparable, with some outstanding programs, he said. “That was what made the transition more appealing,” he said.
One of URI’s strongest assets is its graduate school of oceanography. It also boasts robust programs in areas such as the social sciences, biotechnology, pharmacology and biomedicine. However, in some areas, the programs at Montana are more developed, such as its intellectual property translation service. It also has very tight cooperation with the private sector. That is where Dooley wants to build on what URI is already doing. The college had already identified these as deficient areas before Dooley’s appointment, and there is the will to become more successful and productive in IP translation, he said.
His academic credentials in the sciences are extensive. A California native, Dooley, 55, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California in San Diego. He received a doctorate in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena before becoming an assistant professor at Amherst College in western Massachusetts. He left Amherst for Montana State in 1993, becoming chair of the university’s department of chemistry and biochemistry.
Even in his administrative role, Dooley still keeps his hand in his own research as well, with the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation funding his work.
Rhode Island faces high unemployment, but Dooley believes URI is well positioned to improve education, as well as to contribute to the state’s economy with new moneymaking technologies and services.
“Faculty and students and URI can function as a research and development arm in a cost-effective way. Businesses can leverage the intelligence, enthusiasm and energy of thousands of young people who want to do this and help them prepare for their future,” he said.
Marc Songini is a freelance writer in Mansfield.
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