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NC Research Campus is picking up steam

by Jay Price

  This year, though, the 350-acre campus, taking shape on the former site of a massive textile mill, is gaining momentum.

It has attracted new corporate tenants, including Dole, Monsanto and General Mills, has a commitment for a new U.S. Food and Drug Administration office, and opened a new community college building with 155 students enrolled in a two-year program to train biotechnology workers.

It also plans to break ground soon on another building - its seventh - which will house a branch of the Charlotte-based Carolinas HealthCare system and other health-related tenants.

And officials with campus developer Castle & Cooke said this week that three or four other companies have committed to open branches there but aren't yet ready to announce their plans.

"I'm very pleased with what's happening now," Murdock, 87, said in an interview Friday. "I was not happy with what was happening for the last year and a half because people were just sitting and waiting for something good to happen. But I'm pretty satisfied that the worst has passed, and it's onward and upward."

Growing work force

By year's end, the campus expects to add nearly 50 percent to its current work force of about 270.

There is even an effort to hire researchers for the seven state-supported universities represented on campus - rare in the UNC system, which suffers under a second year of budget cuts and has lost hundreds of jobs.

By the end of the year, the system will have added about 35 faculty and other workers to the campus. This is possible because the state legislature hiked its budget for the research campus by $1 million for the year beginning July 1, on top of a $3 million boost last year.

Steven Zeisel, head of the Nutrition Research Institute, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's program here, said Thursday that he had just offered jobs to four new faculty researchers.

The recent budget increases for the campus were an important vote of confidence, Zeisel said. Because the campus is in its early phases, that public show of support is crucial as he and other program heads try to lure researchers from some of the nation's best institutions.

"I'm competing with the likes of Harvard and Stanford for these hires, asking them to give up supportive environments and come and build the next great research campus," he said. "There is a note of uncertainty in that, so I need to be able to offer them not only a great package, but some assurance that the state isn't going to leave them hanging."

Research projects done on the campus by the universities are carefully chosen to complement each other, said Steven Leath, vice president of research for the UNC system.

Leath said the model of strategically hiring researchers across a complementary range of disciplines, and the focus on the intersection between health and nutrition, make the research campus unique.

"We're addressing a set of the most important problems in society and doing it in an innovative way," he said. "Also, we have the chance there to leverage tremendous private funds that Mr. Murdock has already put in."

N.C. State University has one of the largest presences on campus. Among other things, its researchers have expertise in growing plants - important when another lab finds a health-enhancing characteristic in fruits and vegetables.

And NCSU researchers are mapping the entire set of genetic information for blueberry plants - something that will help provide a roadmap for, say, breeding them to enhance the hefty amount of antioxidants in the fruit.

Appalachian State University has a human performance lab where the effects of a drug or particular natural substance can be measured. The lab has received grants from the U.S. military and private companies, and has worked on various projects with at least half a dozen other labs on campus, Director David Nieman said. "To us, it's like academic heaven being here," Nieman said.

UNC Charlotte, meanwhile, has a group on campus that provides expertise in bioinformatics, helping researchers in other fields design and execute plans for analyzing the massive amounts of data their work generates.

First-rate facilities

The campus, though not nearly complete, looks like that of a small but expensive private college, with atria and airy labs with plenty of natural light. Murdock thinks scientists should have surroundings that inspire, rather than the dismal rooms they're sometimes stuck with. He also bought $30 million in high-end research equipment to entice faculty.

For now, many of the labs are empty or see little use. Zeisel said the facilities are first-rate, but the campus needs substantially more researchers to reach an intellectual critical mass.

That has been coming too slowly, he said, but it will come if things keep moving like they finally started to this year.

The vision for the campus is often compared to that for Research Triangle Park, which was built upon the research capabilities of NCSU, UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University. Zeisel said skeptics of the new research campus should remember that it took decades for RTP to become a major economic force.

"It takes a little while to build the infrastructure of these things," he said. "But I think if we can stay on the same pace, we can have the same kinds of success here."

Article Source: www.newsobserver.com