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Seeds of innovation
In 1998, a paper by Dave Sebring, VBI’s associate director of corporate and government relations, and Dr. Gary Evans, Director of the Natural Resources Institute at the United States Department of Agriculture, found its way into the hands of Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore. The paper asserted that biotechnology would become the new economic engine of growth in the 21st century. It also explicitly argued that regions supporting entrepreneurial activities arising from leading university research in this emerging field were poised to reap major benefits in the years ahead.
Convinced by the arguments about the considerable potential of biotechnology, Gilmore sent the paper to several Virginia colleges. After reading the document, Virginia Tech President Charles Steger believed that opening a bioinformatics center could contribute in a major way to Virginia Tech’s advancement of biotechnology research.
Virginia Tech had already established leading colleges of agriculture and life sciences as well as engineering, which made the creation of a bioinformatics center a natural progression for the university. Virginia Tech began making plans to secure state funding in 1999. The Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission approved $12.3 million from the state to help fund the development of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech. This was the only funding given to the Institute before its opening.
VBI opened its doors in July 2000 in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center with only five employees, including Sebring and VBI Executive and Scientific Director Bruno Sobral.
Growth and expansion
By 2003, VBI had reached a point in its development where it was ready to occupy new premises on the Virginia Tech campus. The first phase of the move to the new facility began in December 2003 when approximately 100 of the Institute’s employees were relocated from Research Building XV at the Corporate Research Center to a new building on Virginia Tech’s campus.
In January 2005, VBI completed its two-phase move onto Virginia Tech’s campus, occupying more than 130,000 square feet on the corner of Washington Street and Duck Pond Drive, while still maintaining a presence at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center.
In 2009, with the recruitment of Dr. Harold "Skip" Garner as the new Executive Director, comes a further commitment to growth in new strategic directions (human disease, -omics), to collaboration between VBI and the greater Virginia Tech and surrounding communities (especially with the new Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute) and bioinformatics/computational biology/biomedical challenges that demand next-generation High Performance Computing environments.
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