Rowan University Names State Technology Leader to Tech Park Board

On Nov 13, 2015

The Rowan University Board of Trustees has appointed Dr. Donald H. Sebastian to the Board of Directors of the South Jersey Technology Park at Rowan University.

Sebastian is president and chief executive officer of the New Jersey Innovation Institute (NJII) and senior vice president of Technology and Business Development at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). The nonprofit NJII at NJIT is a new model for business innovation serving key industrial clusters that anchor the state and national economies.

Located on Rowan’s West Campus in Mantua Township, the Technology Park features the 45,000-square-foot Samuel H. Jones Innovation Center where faculty and students from the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering conduct cutting-edge research in diverse areas. The Technology Park also is home to the Rohrer College of Business incubator program and a unique Virtual Reality Center where teams conduct research for such organizations as the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense, in addition to private industry.

“Don Sebastian’s expertise is exceptionally important to our Technology Park as we focus on expanding our partnerships with business, industry and government and in growing our facilities,” said Dr. Shreekanth Mandayam, executive director of the Technology Park and senior vice president for Research at Rowan. “He is experienced, innovative and committed to New Jersey.”

Sebastian led the effort to form a statewide Health Information Technology Extension Center, funded in part with $25 million from the federal government. He developed the program leading to NJIT’s designation in 2004 as the State’s Homeland Security Technology Systems Center. He also is chairman of the Science and Technology Program Management Committee of the New Jersey Domestic Security Preparedness Task Force. Sebastian has helped lead a State program to develop child-safe weapons technology and was the principal academic organizer of the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium.

A professor in the Department of Chemical, Biological and Pharmaceutical Engineering at NJIT since 1995, Sebastian is executive director of the Center for Manufacturing Systems and founder of the New Jersey Manufacturing Extension Program, Inc. He has served as chairman of the R&D Council of New Jersey and as a member of the Executive Committee of Innovation New Jersey, among other positions.

Prior to joining NJIT, Sebastian was a member of the Chemical Engineering faculty at Stevens Institute of Technology, where he co-founded the Design and Manufacturing Institute.

He earned his Bachelor of Engineering degree from Stevens, graduating as valedictorian. He also received his Master’s of Engineering degree and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Stevens.

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