Venture capitalists will have to choose between green expectations and biophotonics, and stem cell research or virtual infrastructure, when the Third Annual La Jolla Research & Innovation Summit gets underway on April 21.

The crowded half-day event will also feature a plenary session moderated by Calit2 Director Larry Smarr on the “exponential deluge” of data, and a luncheon keynote by Eric Topol, MD, of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI). Dr. Topol, who is also Vice Chair of the West Wireless Health Institute, will talk about the future of wireless healthcare.

The invitation-only summit will take place across from the campus at the Estancia La Jolla Resort & Spa, from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. It is organized by CONNECT, and attendance is reserved for roughly 100 venture capitalists and other members of the financial community who can help academic researchers turn their innovations into new companies or new products for the marketplace.

The program will focus on five well-funded areas of research currently underway in La Jolla and San Diego, each of which has significant potential to translate into commercializable products. The summit agenda is notable for the number of faculty from UC San Diego who are moderating or speaking on the panels.

Calit2’s Smarr will moderate the panel on “Data, Data Everywhere: Coping with the Exponential Deluge,” featuring brief talks by three UCSD faculty members: UC San Diego School of Medicine Chief of Genetics Trey Ideker; San Diego Supercomputer Center Director Mike Norman; and Kevin Patrick, a professor of family and preventive medicine and director of Calit2’s Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems.  Patrick will talk about disruptive wireless systems pointing to a “new world of preventive predictable medicine.” SDSC’s Norman will focus on high-performance data infrastructure, and Ideker is set to discuss the growth of biomedical data produced by a wide range of scientific instruments.

“San Diego has been at the forefront of innovating cyberinfrastructure to keep pace with the onslaught of data on all fronts,” says Smarr. “But there is so much more that needs to be done on many levels, and we are approaching a tipping point where some of this innovation can shift to the private sector and generate new jobs and new businesses for California.”

A second panel will explore “Virtual Infrastructure: The Backbone of Environmental Advances.” The session will be moderated by Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor John Orcutt, who leads the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Cyberinfrastructure project, which is based in Calit2. "The NSF-sponsored ocean observatory cyberinfrastructure is the largest effort to date to develop an end-to-end solution integrating large numbers of instruments, platforms and networks into a comprehensive observatory system,” says Orcutt. “The new information technologies, including messaging in lieu of explicit IP technologies [e.g. FTP or HTTP], enhance error recovery, security and interaction with the 'cloud.'" The panelists all work on the OOI Cyberinfrastructure project; they include Calit2 researcher and Computer Science and Engineering professor Ingolf Krueger, Scripps Research Geophysicist Frank Vernon, and OOI-CI Program Manager Matt Arrott.

The Director of UC San Diego’s Stem Cell Program, Lawrence Goldstein, will chair a panel on “Regenerative Medicine: A Fresh Outlook for Neuro, Cardio and Cancer.” The session highlights the ties that now bind UC San Diego, TSRI, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, which jointly created what is today the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine.  The consortium has brought roughly $260 million in grant funding to San Diego from the state stem-cell agency since 2006. The Summit panel includes Kristen Brennand and Inder Verma (both from the Salk Institute); and Mark Mercola, an adjunct professor in pediatrics and pathology at UCSD, and director of the muscle development and regeneration program at that Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute.  

Other UCSD faculty members set to speak at the La Jolla Research & Innovation Summit include professor of neurosciences and bioengineering Mark Ellisman and Jacobs School electrical and computer engineering professor Yuhwa Lo (both of whom will speak on a biophotonics panel, along with Samuel Pfaff and Bjorn Lillemeier of the Salk Institute). The other panel will focus on “green expectations”; it will be chaired by Stephen Mayfield, Director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology (SD-CAB) and a professor in biological sciences at UCSD. The panel will feature Scripps professor of climate science Ralph Keeling; John Love, an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at San Diego State University; and Jan Kleissl, who is from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

“Currently, the energy market landscape for tariffs and renewable generation treatment is undergoing changes that will create economic incentives to predict solar generation more accurately on very short time scales,” said Kleissl. “This will enable more efficient operation of transmission capacity and ramping of conventional power plants. Our software tools to conduct such forecasts present a significant improvement over other existing techniques.”