Lamont mixes with seniors at the Whitney Center during Chamber gathering.
At Hamden Regional Chamber of Commerce’s first in-person annual breakfast meeting since the beginning of the pandemic, Gov. Ned Lamont touted his administration’s record on the pandemic as well as the net gain in population within the state, a reversal from the 2010s when more people were leaving the state.
Lamont also heard some sharp words on increased state funding for private universities from Quinnipiac University Provost Debra J. Liebowitz.
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Olivia Gross |
Jun 2, 2022 5:05 pm
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Commissioner Russell-Tucker and State Rep. Toni Walker with Gov. Lamont at SCSU Thursday.
Gov. Ned Lamont came to Southern Connecticut State University Thursday to announce that his administration has set aside $2 million in grants to help aspiring teachers a fighting chance at financially making it through school.
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Courtney Luciana |
May 30, 2022 9:39 am
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Aldo Salazar.
Aldo Salazar was sweating bullets while running his usual five-mile route from his place around Orange Street downtown to East Rock Park and back, before heading to a lab where he’s working on a different kind of circuit.
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Courtney Luciana |
May 23, 2022 4:05 pm
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Brisa Mendoza.
As downtown streets closed Monday to make way for a thousand parading Yale graduates, Brisa Mendoza was posted at the center of the brick Broadway center island reading Daughters of Sparta and taking it all in before starting her shift at The Yale Bookstore.
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Maya McFadden |
May 2, 2022 8:59 am
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Maya McFadden Photo
Sunday's ribbon cutting ceremony.
New Haven celebrated keeping hope alive at The Barack H. Obama Magnet University School (BOMUS) Sunday, officially welcoming a new teacher-oriented public school that opened its doors two years ago at the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Kimberly Wipfler |
Apr 28, 2022 9:08 am
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Kimberly Wipfler Photo
The scene at Wednesday's rally.
Graduate student teachers marched alongside hotel workers on closed-off downtown streets in support of two new unionization drives: a revived 30-year-old campaign at Yale, and one at the Graduate New Haven (née Duncan) hotel.
Josh Geballe ushered the DMV into the 21st century. Can he do the same for New Haven’s start-up economy?
He’s ready to give it his best.
Until two months ago, Geballe served as Gov. Ned Lamont’s chief operating officer (aka right-hand man), overseeing daily responses to the Covid-19 pandemic and, not incidentally, finally bringing license renewals online and revamping the seemingly hopeless Department of Motor Vehicles along with a team of other state officials.
Now Geballe has taken on another ambitious task: heading a new department at Yale charged with “supporting and expanding innovation and entrepreneurship across the university and throughout the Greater New Haven region.”
That’s the mission statement of the department, called Yale Ventures. It replaces Yale’s Office of Cooperative Research (OCR) set up in the 1980s to oversee “tech transfer” — helping researchers and profs patent and license their discoveries and turn them into new businesses.
The new Yale Ventures incorporates and expands that mission. It aims to work both within the university and in the broader community to train innovators to start companies, mentor them through the process, seek new corporate funding sources for start-ups, connect local companies as potential partners, help fill New Haven office and lab space, and help entrepreneurs as well as other New Haveners land jobs in the new companies.
Tech start-ups can produce jobs for New Haveners from all walks of life, Geballe (whose formal title at Yale is senior associate provost for entrepreneurship & innovation) stated during a conversation about the new venture Thursday on WNHHFM’s “Dateline New Haven” program: “The typical biotech start-up is going to have some leadership, they’re going to have some PhDs in white coats doing research. They also have lab techs, and office staff. There’s enormous demand, unmet need for those types of jobs.”
Planting start-up seeds throughout town also makes for a potentially stable, long-term economic strategy.
“It’s a much more robust form of economic growth, when you have many smaller firms that are growing,” Geballe observed.
“Some of them become Alexions or Arvinas that employ hundreds of people. But even then it’s not one massive employer that employs thousands of people, that if their technology shifts or they move overseas, then it’s a devastating effect. We have much more diversification.”
In a sense Geballe’s mission marks a third phase in the evolving town-gown effort to replace the tens of thousands of jobs lost to dying or fleeing manufacturers with a new tech-driven eds-and-meds economy. Phase 1 began in the 1980s with OCR’s creation and the creation of Science Park as a successor to the largely abandoned Winchester rifle complex. Yale President Rick Levin ushered in Phase 2.0 by embracing both OCR and Science Park rather than keeping it at arm’s length and working closely with New Haven’s DeStefano administration on economic development. Those efforts bore fruit, as evidence by the filling up of Science park buildings, 300 George St., 100 College St., and the not-yet-finished 101 College St.
Which gives Geballe and his team a chance to bring the effort to the next level.
An initial step will be the Yale-hosted annual Innovation Summit on May 17 and 18 (details here), which this year will feature more participation by innovators outside Yale’s community, who will have the chance to pitch venture capitalists and network with other new-economy movers and shakers.
Geballe: No danger of "getting bored."
Geballe, who is 47 and grew up in Stony Creek, comes to his new task with a combination of tech experience — including learning business management ropes at IBM, then running a successful software start-up (at the dawn of cloud computing’s rise), and finally diving into government service as Lamont’s COO. He said he can envision staying with his new job for decades, for the rest of his career.
He said Yale Ventures itself feels like a start-up. “We’re moving fast,” he said. “We’re not getting everything perfect. We’ll experiment.”
After two career-sector moves in five years, Geballe was asked how long he envisions staying in his new job.
“Rest of my life,” he responded. “ When you’ve got a university like Yale that’s spending a billion dollars a year on R&D, there’s never going to be an end to the new innovations coming out.
“If you ever get bored doing this work, you’re doing this wrong. “
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Thomas Breen |
Apr 19, 2022 9:27 am
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Lucy Gellman photo
Local 33 graduation student-worker organizers, and hunger fasters, in 2017.
Former Local 33 Vice President and current East Rock Alder Charles Decker on Monday: Yale grads deserve a union.
After several years of hibernation, UNITEHERE Local 33 is back — ready to re-block some streets and resume a decades-long push for a union for Yale’s graduate students, teachers, workers, and researchers.
The Board of Alders unanimously approved a deal for Yale to increase its voluntary payments to the city by $52 million over six years — and design and control a city-owned pedestrian plaza on High Street.
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Thomas Breen |
Mar 31, 2022 3:56 pm
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Quinnipiac School of Nursing Dean Lisa O'Connor and SCSU College of Health and Human Services Dean Sandra Bulmer sign the new YNHH partnership agreement at Thursday's presser.
Four colleges and universities from across the region signed onto a new partnership with Yale New Haven Health (YNHH) in a bid to boost the number of nursing school graduates amidst a healthcare workforce crisis.
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Allan Appel |
Mar 25, 2022 12:52 pm
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Pauli Murray.
In 1961 Pauli Murray found joy being in New Haven, to have endless days for study and discernment and to have that culminate, five years later, in her becoming the first African-American student to earn a doctorate from the Yale Law School.
It was the opposite of joyful -– and she never forgot it -– when a landlord on Howe Street refused to rent to her because of her race.
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Maya McFadden |
Mar 25, 2022 12:33 pm
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Maya McFadden Photo
Gold and Gateway community cut ribbon on new center.
While helping to cut the ribbon on a newly renamed Gateway Community College (GCC) counseling and wellness center, alum Kelsey Snedeker thought back to when she lost both her adoptive and biological mothers a few months apart — and how Gateway’s wellness center got her through school and her loss.
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Thomas Breen |
Mar 22, 2022 11:41 am
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Former pizza spot at 82-90 Wall St. today...
Yale image
... Yale's planned transformation of the site.
Yale’s plans to convert a former Wall Street pizza restaurant into classrooms and gathering spaces took a small step forward, as alders unanimously approved a resolution stating that the project won’t require any changes to the university’s central campus parking plan.
Hailing Yale-city deal, clockwise from top left: Dolores Colon, Jahmal Henderson, Abby Feldman, Alejandro Rojas, Ken Suzuki, Rebecca Corbett.
A deal for Yale to increase voluntary payments to the city by $52 million over six years — and design and control a pedestrian plaza on High Street — won a key preliminary aldermanic approval, as supporters hailed a potential turning point in town-gown relations.
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Lary Bloom |
Mar 14, 2022 10:54 am
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The author and his Yalie.
It took me more than seven decades to get into Yale, not as an undergrad but a lecturer. It took our pooch, Lucca, only 15 months to receive his notice of acceptance as a student.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Feb 25, 2022 12:37 pm
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Rendering of planned QU expansion.
A new 417-bed residence hall, school of business, and auditorium-laboratory complex on Quinnipiac University’s Northern Hamden campus should mean fewer students taking up Hamden housing, not more.
Yale is encouraging students to leave campus early, moving exams online, and switching to to-go meals as the fall semester ends amid a new wave of Covid-19 infections.
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Lary Bloom |
Nov 22, 2021 12:46 pm
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Lary Bloom photos
Some of the fans were actually paying attention to first downs and quarterback sacks.
If you missed Saturday’s shindig at the Yale Bowl on an afternoon of near perfect football weather, you avoided a crowd of about 40,000 there to see the Harvards and Sons of Eli take the field for the 137th time.
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Paul Bass & Tom Breen |
Nov 17, 2021 12:04 pm
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Thomas Breen photos
High Street between Chapel and Elm: So long cars.
Mayor Elicker and Yale President Salovey at Wednesday’s presser.
Yale and the city announced a deal Wednesday to increase the university’s voluntary contributions by a total of $52 million over the next six years, while creating a Yale-managed pedestrian plaza on High Street and establishing a new “inclusive growth” center to pursue town-gown fiber optic or green-energy projects.
