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City Club of Eugene: The Knight Campus: How The Growth Of A Research Juggernaut Can Change The World

Phil and Penny Knight Campus For Accelerating Scientific Impact

Program Date: Sept. 24, 2021

Air Date: Sept. 27, 2021

From the City Club of Eugene:

In 2016, Phil and Penny Knight donated $500 million – the largest gift ever given to a U.S. public flagship university at the time – to launch the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact at the University of Oregon.

As described by UO, the goal of the Campus is to “fast-track scientific discoveries into innovations that improve the quality of life for people in Oregon, the nation, and the world. The campus creates the intellectual infrastructure to establish Oregon as a center for both research and development, making Oregon a place where companies can start-up, grow, and stay.”

Five years (and another $500 million donation) later, we’ll check in with Executive Director Robert Guldberg to see how the Knight Campus is changing the world through research and development and changing Eugene through the construction of a new campus on Franklin Boulevard.

We’ll also get a preview of what’s coming next and how the discoveries and inventions emerging from the Campus can have an impact right here at home.

Speaker:

Robert Guldberg is vice president and Robert and Leona DeArmond executive director of the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact at the University of Oregon. He earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in bioengineering from the University of Michigan. Guldberg also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular biology at Michigan before joining the faculty of Georgia Institute of Technology in 1996. At Georgia Tech, Guldberg was a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering and served as executive director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (2010-2018) before moving to Oregon to lead the Knight Campus.

His research focuses on musculoskeletal regenerative medicine, biomaterials, immunoengineering, mechanobiology, and orthopedic medical device design and is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense. Over his 20+ year academic career, Dr. Guldberg has produced more than 250 peer-reviewed publications, served as an advisor and board member for numerous biotechnology companies, patented multiple technologies, and co-founded five start-ups. In 2017, he was a keynote speaker at the Major League Baseball Winter Annual Meetings in Orlando, FL, describing the challenges and opportunities in regenerative medicine for athletes. At the national level, Dr. Guldberg has held several leadership positions, including President of the Americas Chapter of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS-AM). Dr. Guldberg is an elected fellow of TERMIS, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).