Keck’s First Class Graduates, Response to Program Strong

By LAURENCE DARMIENTO

Staff Reporter

Jeffrey Graybill plans to start work later this month at a local biotech startup called Ionian Technologies after having completed his master’s at the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences.

The $51,000 job will get him in on the ground floor of the Upland company, giving him a financial stake in its future and performing the variety of tasks often required of employees in a small firm.

For the 25-year-old Louisiana native, the job was just what he had in mind. Ionian has just six employees and he didn’t want to work for a big, established company.

But perhaps more important, at least from the school’s perspective, is that Graybill was just the kind of employee Ionian was looking for.

“Jeff has a great set of skills for this position. We require people who work here to wear many hats,” said Sean Gallagher, the chief executive of Ionian. “Not only does he have a strong tech background but a strong background in the business of bioscience.”

Graybill is a member of the first graduating class at Keck, one of the Claremont Colleges, which enrolled its first students two years ago and offers what school officials say is a unique master’s of bioscience that was developed to serve the bioscience industry.

Keck got its start in 1997 with a $50 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation and offers an interdisciplinary curriculum of scientific and technical training with courses in management, public policy and ethics.

“We think that this is the mix the industry really needs,” said Keck Institute President Hank Riggs, a former engineering faculty member at Stanford.

The curriculum is intended to offer companies an alternative to common employment practices, which typically involve hiring graduates with bachelor’s degrees to perform lower-level lab work or highly skilled Ph.D’s who lack business training.

“Bioscience companies tend to have an exceedingly strong Ph.D. culture, but getting a Ph.D. tends to be a narrowing rather than a broadening experience,” said Riggs, who concedes he’s had to sell that notion to potential employers.

Two-thirds of the 28 graduates have found jobs, while the remaining third are still looking. Among the employers are biotechnical and pharmaceutical powerhouses like Amgen Inc., Allergan Inc., Eli Lilly & Co., Beckman Coulter Inc. and Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc., as well as a number of smaller companies.

As a private school, Keck sees itself as serving the entire biotech industry, but Riggs says that it would probably end up working with locally based companies even more. About two thirds of the graduates are expected to stay with Southern California companies, and Riggs adds that as the local biotech industry develops, the better able Keck will be to attract top candidates.

Internship experience

Graybill, who has a bachelor’s in bioengineering from Louisiana State University, had been thinking about attending a Ph.D. program at either Rice University or the University of Florida before applying to Keck at the last moment.

At Keck, all the students take core classes in science and business the first year, followed by an internship and then a group master’s project in year two. This past year, he worked at another local company, Zuyder Pharmaceuticals. He was involved in its scientific work but also made a presentation to venture capitalists. “The program fosters an entrepreneurial spirit,” Graybill said.

Graybill will test that at Ionian, which is developing a novel way to detect variation in genes through the measurement of mass a potentially breakthrough technology but one still in its infancy.

The first class at Keck drew from 11 states and five foreign countries, including India, China and Norway, as well as such prestigious schools as Princeton and Stanford.

The school admitted 30 students to its second class and 45 students will enter this fall. Ultimately the school would like to boost enrollment to 60 students per class. “I think we have proven there is a high demand for students who are educated in this manner,” Riggs said.