The North Carolina Biotechnology Center has named an executive director to oversee its regional office in western North Carolina.
Jonathon Lawrie is taking the reins of the Biotechnology Center’s western office in Asheville, North Carolina. Lawrie is a professor in the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Western Carolina University‘s College of Business.
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The Biotechnology Center is a private, nonprofit corporation supported by the North Carolina General Assembly. The Biotechnology Center, headquartered in Research Triangle Park, has five regional offices that carry out the center’s mission of supporting biotechnology business and education statewide. Lawrie will oversee Biotechnology Center activities in a mountainous 25-county region whose forests and diversity of plant species have potential commercial value as medicines and nutritional supplements.
Lawrie earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of California, Irvine and graduate degrees in microbiology and immunology from the University of Washington. He has industry experience having founded the California biotech firm Codon, which produced medical enzymes, veterinary vaccines and diagnostics for human infectious diseases.
Lawrie has also worked in various positions at Amoco, Roche Diagnostic Systems, Cardiovascular Diagnostics and Becton Dickinson Technologies. He is the co-founder and former president of StemCo Biomedical (now known as Aldagen) in Durham, North Carolina and in 2006, he helped found Raleigh vaccine developer Arbovax. Lawrie joined the BioBusiness Center at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College in 2006. Three years later, he joined Western Carolina University.
Lawrie takes over western office responsibilities from Steve Casey, the Biotechnology Center’s vice president of statewide operations. Casey has been serving as interim director of the western office for the past two years.