Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Biotechnology ‘investment visionary’ to speak at Illinois

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – A longtime leader and promoter of biotechnology will speak about the potential for state and regional development of the industry at 2 p.m. Wednesday (March 17) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

G. Steven Burrill, chief executive officer of Burrill & Co., will speak in Room 102B of the Chemical and Life Sciences Lab, 601 S. Goodwin Ave., Urbana. His talk, “Biotechnology 2004: A State and Regional Perspective for Bioeconomic Development,” is free and open to the public. The Institute for Genomic Biology and the Office of the Vice President for Technology and Economic Development are sponsors of the event.

Burrill founded Burrill & Co., a San Francisco-based private merchant bank dedicated to the life sciences, in 1994. For the previous 28 years he had represented Ernst & Young’s financial services with clients in the areas of life sciences and high technology. In 2002, Scientific American recognized Burrill as “biotechnology’s investment visionary.”

He currently is chairman of the board for Paradigm Genetics and Pyxis Genomics and is the author of several articles and books that focus on the field of biotechnology.

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Engineering Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Nishant Garg, center, is joined by fellow researchers, from left: Yujia Min, Hossein Kabir, Nishant Garg, center, Chirayu Kothari and M. Farjad Iqbal, front right. In front are examples of clay samples dissolved at different concentrations in a NaOH solution. The team invented a new test that can predict the performance of cementitious materials in mere 5 minutes. This is in contrast to the standard ASTM tests, which take up to 28 days. This new advance enables real-time quality control at production plants of emerging, sustainable materials. Photo taken at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. (Photo by Fred Zwicky / University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Researchers develop a five-minute quality test for sustainable cement industry materials

A new test developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can predict the performance of a new type of cementitious construction material in five minutes — a significant improvement over the current industry standard method, which takes seven or more days to complete. This development is poised to advance the use of next-generation resources called supplementary cementitious materials — or SCMs — by speeding up the quality-check process before leaving the production floor.

Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

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