Profits and Professors

Fifteen years ago, Bryan Wilson was a young Colorado State professor looking for some space for his new lab. There wasn’t anywhere for him on campus, so he headed out into the community surrounding the university to find a good spot for his work. He came across the long-abandoned Old Fort Collins Power Plant, first built in 1936. He did what any aspiring scientist would do upon encountering an 30,000-square-foot industrial space with no bathrooms: He asked the city if he could have it—and they said yes.

“But the university wasn’t eager to take on this huge white elephant; they said, ‘You can do this, but you have to make it a freestanding enterprise,’” Wilson says, and so the Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory (EECL) was born.

Today, EECL has come to serve as a technology incubator, providing know-how, testing infrastructure, and workspace to fledgling companies. Already three startups have spun out of its doors, and Colorado State is now launching an ambitious new program headed by Wilson: the 100-faculty-strong Clean Energy Supercluster. The program, following two others in the health sciences, could supplant older models of technology transfer, and speed much-demanded scientific advances into the market.

Read the rest of the article at Sustainable Industries.