EDUCATION
Oregon Graduate Center Looks to Future with Confidence Private, stand-alone graduate school emphasizing science and engineering expects to double its faculty, quadruple its students within eight years Rudy M. Baum, C&EN San Francisco
Institutions of higher education come in all shapes and sizes, and it's unlikely that the structure of any particular one could accurately be described as unique. Nevertheless, the Oregon Graduate Center, located outside Portland, comes fairly close to being one of a kind. OGC is a private, stand-alone graduate school emphasizing education and research in specialized areas of science and engineering. Located in Beaverton, Ore., it has 48 faculty members, none of whom is tenured, and 150 full- or parttime students. The graduate center awards M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied physics, chemistry, biology, materials science, environmental science, computer science, and related fields of engineering. Created in 1963 by then-Governor Mark O. Hatfield and a number of community leaders to support science-based industry in the Portland metropolitan area, OGC celebrated its 25th anniversary this year more confident of its future than at any time in its sometimes rocky history. OGC also saw the appointment of a new president in 1988. Dwight A. Sangrey, formerly dean of engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, arrived in September with a mandate to increase significantly the size of OCG's faculty and student body. Sangrey's career has included stints as a professor in the civil en26
November 28, 1988 C&EN
gineering department at Cornell University and head of the civil engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University before he moved to Rensselaer. His career .shifts have been motivated in part, he says, by the perception that "higher education in engineering in the U.S. was going to be dominated by universityindustry relations" both in terms of research and education and, more broadly, in terms of university contributions to regional economic development. Moving to OGC was a logical next step on that career path, Sangrey says. He calls the graduate center a powerful example of "universityindustry-government cooperation for higher education and research in engineering science." OGC has put most of its "growing pains" behind it, he says, and is now a "mature, successful, and extremely highquality institution." His goal is to double the size of the faculty and quadruple the size of the graduate student body over the next five to eight years. That ambitious program of growth may well be a realistic one. Sangrey says that Oregon's governor, Neil E. Goldschmidt, favors a general expansion of technical higher education in the state and views OGC as a key participant in that expansion. "Being private, OGC can move much more rapidly, without the traditional encumbrances of a public university," Sangrey says. Sangrey points to OGC's increasing participation in a program called the Oregon Center for Advanced Technology Education (OCATE) to support his contention. OCATE was established in 1985 to provide graduate-level education in science and technology disciplines in the Portland area. Courses are taught by instructors from public and private
colleges and universities in Oregon. The state and OGC recently entered a contractual agreement for "OGC to be the major contributor of technical courses to OCATE," Sangrey says. The agreement creates a "very constructive relationship" between OGC and the state education system, he says. "The kind of commitment OGC is making to the state is balanced by the state's commitment to provide a significant income stream. We essentially are guaranteed in this arrangement that there will be a market for our courses, and that removes a bit of the risk in bringing on new faculty." That kind of security has been lacking through much of OGC's history. Although it has always attracted a small coterie of high-quality researchers, many of them drawn by the center's unique structure and the feeling that they could help shape the development of the young institution, OGC has been plagued through much of its history by the lack of a secure f u n d i n g base. Hatfield's efforts to secure $1.5 million in state funds for OGC early in its existence were rebuffed by the state legislature, setting a tone for relations between OGC and the state that persisted until recently. OGC probably would not have survived without the support of a number of local businessmen, in particular Howard Vollum, founder of Tektronix Corp., a fervent believer in the center who backed up his belief with generous contributions to it throughout its existence. Upon his death in 1986, Vollum bequeathed OGC $14.8 million, providing the center with an endowment for the first time in its history. OGC's character is largely a prod-
uct of the research conducted there. James F. Pankow, chairman of OGCs department of environmental science and engineering, in some ways typifies OGCs faculty. A graduate of California Institute of Technology, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in environmental chemistry, Pankow was attracted to OGC, in part, by its lack of an academic bureaucracy. His research focuses primarily on the behavior and fate of organic compounds in groundwater, surface water, and the atmosphere. Pankow observes that academic environmental science departments tend to fall into one of two categories. One emphasizes important policy questions such as how to go about implementing programs to reduce acid rain or carbon dioxide emissions. The other emphasizes "the hard-core chemistry, physics, and biology of environmental science, which is the theme running through our program," he says. The department has seven faculty members with research interests ranging from computation fluid dynamics aimed at modeling transport processes in natural waters to metabolism of xenobiotic organic contaminants in the environment by bacteria to the physical and analytical chemistry of atmospheric aerosols. Pankow would like to see the program expand its efforts in a num-
Sangrey: a market for our courses
ber of areas, including research on the atmosphere, coastal contamination, and the role of biological processes in the environment. "Our goal is to establish an environmental science department that is characterized by two things: top scientists in all the major disciplines covered by environmental science and engineering, and effective collaboration," Pankow says. He maintains that whereas many institutions pay lip service to environmental science and engineering as an interdisciplinary field, the emphasis on individual research achievements often prevents interdisciplinary bridges between researchers from being built. "We want people who are excellent in their fields and who build their careers doing significant interdisciplinary research," he says. Michael H. Gold, who is chairman of OGCs department of chemical, biological, and environmental sciences, came to the graduate center from Rockefeller University, an institution that OGC resembles in some ways, 12 years ago. OGC had received funds from the local forest products industry to study lignin biodégradation, a process carried out in nature by fungi known as whiterot basidiomycetes. OGC was looking for a biochemist and a geneticist specializing in fungi. Because of Gold's background, he wound up being hired to fill both roles. Gold has made major contributions in understanding the biodégradation of lignin. Two extracellular enzymes produced by the whiterot fungi Phanerochaete chrysosporium, lignin peroxidase and manganese peroxidase, are responsible for the breakdown of lignin. Lignin peroxidase was discovered independently in 1983 in Gold's laboratory and the laboratory of T. Kent Kirk at the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wis. Gold's group discovered manganese peroxidase the following year. Efforts by Gold and coworkers have played an important role in elucidating the mechanisms of both enzymes. Such research continues in Gold's laboratory, as well as research geared toward developing economically viable applications of the enzymes. Like Pankow, Gold envisions continued growth for the department
Pankow: top scientists, collaboration he heads. Three groups in the dep a r t m e n t focus on m e m b r a n e s , metalloenzym.es, and biotechnology. Gold wants to focus the efforts of the biotechnology group on aspects of industrial bioprocessing, specifically biotechnology applied to biomass utilization. Although admitting that Oregon started late in the biotechnology sweepstakes, Gold says that "we are trying to develop the industry, and I think OGC can play a unique role because we are used to working with industry." Building industrial relationships has been one of OGCs strengths. Still, Sangrey believes that it is an area that needs to be exploited to an even greater degree if the center is to achieve its potential. "We have just begun to scratch the surface there," he says. Sangrey also believes that OGC needs to increase its emphasis on education, but not at the expense of its research activities. "The focus of OGC has been on high-level graduate research and education, focusing mainly on Ph.D. students." He points out that there is a large demand in the Portland area for master's-level education that OGC needs to play a role in meeting. "I think we can do that as a complement to the quality research program we already have," he says. D November 28, 1988 C&EN
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