ATMC hosts area's young leaders

By Grant Welker
Fall River Herald News
December 17, 2008

Direct link to article online.

Photo Details: Shelly Correia, left, program director of Harbour House Family Shelter, and Maria Pinareta, a vice president at Bank Five, sneak a peek at an ongoing experiment in the environmental chemistry lab at the Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center on Wednesday. The experiment attempts to convert plant waste into a usable fuel. Photo taken by the Herald News.

Fall River --

The rundown of the entrepreneurial opportunities in the greater Fall River and New Bedford area was a lesson for members of Leadership SouthCoast, but it also could have served as a primer for anyone not familiar with new local business initiatives.

The 18 people in Leadership SouthCoast -- a yearlong program that breeds leaders to "serve as catalysts and sustainers of positive change" -- visited the Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center on Wednesday to tour labs used by students and startup companies, and hear from companies that create offshore floating wind turbines and solar thermal technology.

Many of the cutting-edge companies in the area connect with each other at the ATMC, with college students and with people like John Miller and Louis Petrovic, leaders at the ATMC that help startups "graduate" to operate on their own.

"It's working," said Petrovic, the center's director. "Part of it is telling people that they have good ideas."

The ATMC gives resources like lab space and the help of interns to startups developing things like underwater communication systems, asphalt that allows water to drain through it, and a system that creates energy from wastewater while eliminating harmful byproducts.

The center, operated by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, could also play a role in the development of deep-sea wind turbines, said Raymond Dackerman, the general manager of Blue H USA, based in Boston, which has built a prototype off the coast of Italy.

"There is great infrastructure in Fall River and New Bedford to build these," he said. "It would be a great shot in the arm (for the area’s economy)."

Meditech, which opened next door to the ATMC this spring, has been a boon to the region and still has room to hire 250 more workers, said Antone Vieira Jr., the program director for Leadership SouthCoast and the executive director for the UMass Dartmouth Corporate Programs and Partnerships. Leadership SouthCoast students toured the Meditech office building and talked with its recruiters.

Melissa Pacheco, a senior program specialist for UMass Dartmouth Corporate Programs and Partnerships, is taking the program to "get to know the needs of the community, and work together to improve and help."

Caroline Cuccia, the director of marketing and public relations for the United Way of Greater New Bedford, said the course has "opened up my eyes to the resources on the SouthCoast." She said she wants to network with other agencies and noted the United Way helped pay the $4,000 tuition.

Athena M.G. Mota is taking the course while going to school for her master's in public administration and working as the director of advocacy and communications for the YWCA of Southeastern Massachusetts. Other students are from places like SMILES, the Garfield Foundation, Bristol Community College, hospitals and banks.

This year's Leadership SouthCoast began with a two-day retreat at Rachel's Lakeside, a banquet hall on the Dartmouth-Westport line, with team-building and leadership exercises. Each month through June, the group will hear from different community and businesses leaders, each with a theme like education, health care and public dialogue.

Wednesday's theme was science, technology and environment.