Team York returns from another successful mission

Team York returned from another successful mission, this time to Raleigh, North Carolina. In early March they visited several areas, including Duke University, North Carolina State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC Department of Commerce, Cary Chamber of Commerce, the Research Triangle Park (RTP) (a campus dedicated to nurturing research and development organizations) and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.

Their visit served several purposes, the main ones being as follows:

  • To develop relationships with the three universities in order to facilitate future research collaborations between our researchers and researchers at those institutions;
  • To learn best practices for research, technology and knowledge transfer and university/community/industry liaison;
  • To learn more about the efforts underway in North Carolina to engage the universities with their communities, since York is working on several research initiatives that will connect York University to York region; and
  • To hold an alumni event as York has close to 50 alumni in the Raleigh-Durham area. About a dozen alumni attended a small reception and there was great interest in starting up a chapter.

The Team York delegation members who were on the Raleigh trip are:

  • Stan Shapson, vice-president research & innovation
  • Suzanne MacDonald, associate vice-president research
  • Gillian Wu, dean, Faculty of Pure & Applied Science
  • Dezsö Horváth, dean, Schulich School of BusinessMichael Siu, professor and director, Centre for Research in Mass Spectrometry
  • Peter Ross, industry liaison consultant, Office of the VP Research & Innovation
  • Christian Buhagiar, manager, research policy & government relations, office of the VP Research & Innovation
  • Stephen Chait, director of economic development, Town of Markham

Bob Glandfield, industrial technology advisor, National Research Council of Canada