Harold J. Raveche Speaker & Booking Information

Dr. Harold J. Raveche, president of Stevens Institute of Technology, addressed representatives of New Jersey technology companies at the Newark Technology Group Breakfast, an event held June 12 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center's Theatre Square Grill in Newark, N.J.

About 250 technology leaders and investors listened as Raveche outlined the unique partnerships cultivated by Stevens under the umbrella of Technogenesis®, a term that describes Stevens' distinct educational environment. In the Technogenesis process, faculty and students collaborate with colleagues in industry, government and academia, developing new technologies from innovation to marketplace implementation.

Raveche traced the origin of the concept to the Stevens family, well noted as America's first family of inventors and the founders of the Institute. Their role in helping to establish patent law in the 1790s, as means to safeguard their own inventions and the intellectual property of others, laid the foundation of America's entrepreneurial tradition. With their establishment of the Institute, the family codified the concept of a broad-based engineering education with a view to the creation of real-world technology applications.

President Raveche went on to describe the current infrastructure for implementing the Technogenesis process, introducing the Stevens administrators who make it possible, including:

Gina Boesch, Director of the Technology Ventures Incubator (TVI). The Stevens Incubator is New Jersey's most successful, being one of seven academic-related incubators in the state dedicated to assisting entrepreneurs in start-up ventures. TVI companies have generated more than 250 new jobs. They have been awarded 158 patents in their respective technologies and received more than $23.5 million in external funding. TVI is supported in part by the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology and by corporate sponsors. (Ty J. Williams, a TVI advisory board member who is also a senior vice president and technology financial services manager at First Union Bank, introduced Raveche at the breakfast.)

Sarah Jane Militello, a veteran business executive in the technology field, is the Chief Operating Officer of Stevens Technologies, Inc., a venture-fund corporation that works in cooperation with the Institute and TVI companies to achieve timely capitalization and spin-out of new technology enterprises.

Dr. Frank Fernandez, the former head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, is Stevens' Director for Institute Technology Initiatives, supervising the intellectual property issues involved in technology transfer and commercialization.

Raveche illustrated the actualization of Technogenesis through the work of HydroGlobe LLC, a Stevens-incubated environmental technology company. HydroGlobe has developed and patented systems for the removal of naturally occurring arsenic from drinking water, as well as for capturing and eliminating arsenic and other heavy metals from the water supply at industrially polluted sites. HydroGlobe and technology advisors from Stevens have field-tested and installed the metals-removal technology at various locations in the United States. In Bangladesh, where arsenic contamination of well water is creating health hazards of catastrophic proportions, a pilot project in cooperation with a Non-Governmental Organization has been in successful progress for more than a year.

Another example offered by Raveche was a technology developed by the Acoustical Group at Stevens. Their acoustical sensing and detection technology has given rise to three companies: One involves an application for the detection of buried landmines; another company uses acoustical sensing to diagnose cracks and structural flaws in everything from urban infrastructure to aircraft components; and still another licenses a very practical application that is being commercialized for the detection of active infestations by wood-consuming insects such as termites.

"One technology, three applications, three companies," said Raveche. "That is the ultimate product of the Technogenesis environment at Stevens."

The Newark Technology Group is a consortium of businesses dedicated to locating and supporting new technology ventures in and around the City of Newark. The co-founding sponsors of the organization are Ty J. Williams, First Union National Bank, and Christian Benedetto, National Redevelopment, LLC. Other sponsors include PSE&G, Sills Cummis Capital Markets, and NJBIZ (formerly Business News New Jersey). Sprint PCS was the sponsor of the June 12th breakfast. Organizational supporters include RBP and the New Jersey Technology Council.

The Newark Technology Group hosts the Newark Technology Networking Breakfast Program on the second Wednesday of every month, providing a time and place for technology professionals and relevant service providers to network with their peers.