06/10/16  Portland, Ore.

 

OHSU faculty and the OHSU-Intel collaboration are featured prominently in a newly-released book, "The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation." 

Written by Dutch co-authors Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker, the book tours "brainbelts" in America and northern Europe –including Portland, Ore. –describing how local, academic-industry collaborations have propelled communities into emerging centers of economic strength. 

Joe Gray, Ph.D., Gordon Moore Endowed Chair in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, OHSU School of Medicine, and director of the OHSU Center for Spatial Systems Biomedicine., and Mary Stenzel-Poore, Ph.D., senior associate dean for research in the OHSU School of Medicine, are among those quoted in the book.

An excerpt:
Perhaps the most emblematic initiative of Portland's academic-manufacturing brainsharing is the one between OHSU and Intel. Mary Stenzel-Poore helped get the program off the ground. She is a person who describes complex problems as "delicious" and regards the reduction in grants from the NIH as a positive development. Why? Because it forced the sharing of brainpower. As we saw in so many other brainbelts, it is often necessity that forces the emergence of team science, cross-disciplinary collaboration and knowledge sharing. "People will only partner when they can't get there alone," Stenzel-Poore told us.

Both partners see this kind of brainpower sharing as the way forward. For Intel, health care is a key future market, one it wants to lead by creating the next generation of high-powered chips. The goal is to be able to analyze an individual's DNA in a period of hours, rather than weeks, and to do so for tens of dollars, rather than thousands. OHSU provides the patient data that Intel needs and, in return, gains the ability to treat its patients more effectively.