COVER STORY

Katrice Jalbert, a graduate of the biotechnology education program at N.H. Community Technical College in Portsmouth, plans to make the most of her career opportunities in the field. Michael McCord photo

It's not every school that can promise local world-class training and a comprehensive two-year program that leads to guaranteed employment.

Sonia Wallman, the director of the Biotechnology Education and Technology Center at the Pease campus of New Hampshire Community Technical College, has been beating the drum of biotech education in the region and nationally since 1994.

By any measure, Wallman runs an incredibly successful program that should be drawing a wide range of students. Every year, 30 NHCTC graduates depart the campus with training and a pipeline to good-paying jobs to the exploding biomanufacturing industry "" which includes the life sciences, biosciences and medical sciences "" that includes such local powerhouse companies as Swiss-based Lonza at Pease International Tradeport and the fast growing Bentley Pharmaceuticals in Exeter.

The dilemma for Wallman and others in her field is bridging the gap between perception and reality, of breaking through overly politicized issues such as stem cells or cultural confusion about what scientific research and application means.

"Biomanufacturing is the wave of the future," Wallman said about the rapid growth in industries that depend on the physical and applied life sciences in sectors as varied as pharmaceuticals and biofuels. According to the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, the growth in scientific research, development and technical services will grow by an estimated 70 percent between 2002 and 2012 because of a projected overflow of drugs and biotech-related products expected to flood the market in the coming decades.

Brookings also reports that from 2000 to 2006, biotech and biopharmaceutical firms in the United States and Puerto Rico raised more than $120 billion in financing and employed more than 1.2 million workers.

While the biotech and biomanufacturing sectors are in need of research, physical and even social scientists "" the latter will no doubt consider the myriad of ethical and moral consequences of the biotech product revolution "" more than 75 percent of the work is done by the types of biotechnicians trained at NHCTC.

"The word is still not out," Wallman said. "We could double our enrollment."

Lonza Biologics at Pease International Tradeport has worked in partnership to train the next generation of biotech workers. Michael McCord photo

One of the barriers she has to break down is that the public mistakenly believes that four-year or advanced college degrees are needed to get a job. The bioeconomy is growing so quickly and is so new that the federal government doesn't even have a job classification for the biotechnology field, which means career and employment counselors at all levels need to be made aware of the biomanufacturing option for students and workers.

As traditional manufacturing disappears overseas or is made obsolete, biomanufacturing has emerged as the 21st century version of the factory job. The Battelle Memorial Institute, a biotech industry think tank, estimates the average salary in the bioscience field to be about $65,775, or some $26,000 higher than the average private-sector wage in the country.

The good news for Wallman, who is considered one of the leading biotech education administrators in the country, is that she has no shortage of success stories.

One of those stories is Katrice Jalbert, a recent NHCTC graduate and full-time worker at Lonza, who has literally traveled the country sharing the gospel of career opportunities. Jalbert is a hard working and ambitious 19-year-old with big plans for her future.

"I plan to get a bachelor's and master's," Jalbert said recently about her goal to continue her education "" which will be greatly financed by Lonza "" at UNH. "I really want to go into forensics and you need a PhD for that.

"It's hands-on theory. Everything is small scale and they teach you how everything works," said Jalbert about her academic experiences at NHCTC and before that, at the Seacoast School of Technology which was her entry point into the biotech field.

She parlayed an apprenticeship at Lonza into part-time employment there while completing her studies at NHCTC, which led to a full-time job after she graduated in May.

With Wallman, Jalbert has attended biotech and biomanufacturing conferences in California, North Carolina, and Boston, talking about her experiences and career path. In Boston, she discovered that she had more experience working in the environment of a Bio Safety Cabinet than two people in the field with much higher academic credentials. It was a revealing moment, Jalbert said, about how far and how fast she had traveled.

Nancy Pierce, the principal of the Seacoast School of Technology in Exeter, isn't surprised to hear the success of one of her graduates.

"We hear it all the time," Pierce said about the training given to students in the school's renowned biotech program that was created and is run by Carolyn Kelley, who was named the 2007 New Hamphsire Teacher of the Year. Pierce said that SST student apprentices working at UNH or NHCTC often have more training and hands-on experience than college students.

The biotech program at SST, which serves the vocational needs of six Seacoast region high schools, has leveraged its success and popularity to have a modern $500,000 laboratory that is one of the best in the country, said Pierce said.

"The beauty of our program is that we draw valedictorians and mediocre students. What they have is an interest in science that we encourage," she said.

It's that interest that Wallman, who works closely with SST, seeks to develop at the next level and the economic stakes are considerable.

"New Hampshire is being recognized more as a biomanufacturing leader," Wallman said, as she prepared for BIOMAN 2007, a major week-long biomanufacturing conference that is being held in July at NHCTC for the second straight year.

BIOMAN brings together educators, industry leaders, vendors and students and Wallman said the national conference draws even more attention in a region that is already considered a biotechnology hotbed "" in part because of the highly skilled and educated work force. As local examples, Wallman said Lonza can't hire enough biotechnicians to keep up with its production needs, and Bristol-Myers Squibb is building a $660 million biologics facility at Devens, Mass.

She told me that on any given day, more than 1,000 biotechnician jobs are going unfilled within commuting distance of NHCTC. Altogether, six out of the top 10 biopharmaceutical companies in the world are located in the Northeast. More of those jobs are being filled "" often at starting salaries ranging from $35,000 to $50,000 "" by students who attended SST or NHCTC or both, like Katrice Jalbert.