"The Next Frontier"
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  • Joe DeSimone

The Next Frontier

A love for research and polymers, born at Ursinus College, fuels Joe DeSimone’s quest for innovation. It was only after he had earned his doctorate in chemistry at Virginia Tech and joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that Joe DeSimone ’86 P’12 came to fully appreciate the value of the liberal arts education he received at Ursinus College.

Story by Jack Croft

“As an assistant professor, you’ve got to not only do research, but you’ve got to write and you’ve got to make arguments and you’ve got to do analysis, and you’ve got to pull disparate things together,” DeSimone says.

He candidly admits that as a student, he questioned why he was taking liberal arts classes at Ursinus. But courses ranging from Western literature to Latin to economics “gave me a leg up on others,” he says. “I could write. I was much more effective. And it dawned on me that, boy, I’m glad I did all that other stuff because it’s proven to be really valuable.”

A scientist, entrepreneur, academic, and innovator with a passion for polymers, DeSimone is now cofounder and CEO of Carbon, a highly successful Silicon Valley startup that is revolutionizing 3D printing. Through its partnership with the German-based, global sportswear company Adidas, Carbon is pioneering the use of 3D printing to manufacture products at scale by using the Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) technology developed by DeSimone and his research team at UNC. Carbon plans to produce millions of lightweight, latticework midsoles for the company’s Futurecraft 4D running shoes in 2019.

For DeSimone, the academic and entrepreneurial aspects of his distinguished career work together hand-in-glove. Both have been fueled by his love of research and, more specifically, polymers—a love that was first kindled as a student at Ursinus.

Growing up in Collegeville, DeSimone was always familiar with Ursinus College. As a student at Perkiomen Valley High School, he played sports and attended other activities on campus, took some courses there his senior year, and had his high school graduation ceremony in the Ursinus gym.

“My family was not very well-off financially, and I ended up getting pretty good scholarship money from Ursinus,” DeSimone says. “I was the first in my family to go to college.”

DeSimone had discovered in high school that he had a knack for understanding and explaining chemistry, and a weeklong, hands-on summer chemistry camp at Lebanon Valley College confirmed that he would enter Ursinus as a chemistry major.

“I fell in love with research at Ursinus,” he says. “It was really a wonderful time.”

DeSimone fondly recalls the chemistry professors who helped set him on his course, among them Roger Staiger, Ron Hess, who taught organic chemistry, and Vic Tortorelli, who taught a special reactivity course. But most influential was Ray Schultz, a polymer scientist who taught an undergraduate polymer course.

“I think Ursinus was the only undergraduate school on the East Coast or possibly in the nation that had a polymer chemistry course,” DeSimone says. “Ray’s love for the topic really hooked me and I fell in love with it, too. I did research in his lab and it was really awesome exposure. It galvanized my love for the subject.”

DeSimone also credits Schultz with opening the door for him to get into the prestigious graduate chemistry program at Virginia Tech led by nationally renowned polymers expert James E. McGrath. Schultz created a pipeline between the two schools by sending three or four previous students to McGrath’s program.

“Virginia Tech had really good experience with Ursinus students and they rolled out the red carpet for me,” he recalls.

It was at Virginia Tech that DeSimone came to a realization that has become an important theme in his career: “Polymer science lends itself to a utilitarian mindset.”

“I became really enamored with doing research toward making better products or trying to achieve functionality that was needed in microelectronics or in cars,” he recalls. “It was very much an applied field.”

After earning his doctorate from Virginia Tech, DeSimone was recruited to the faculty of UNC at Chapel Hill as a 25-year-old assistant professor. As a mentor, he has graduated 80 students from his research group—half of them from groups who are underrepresented in the sciences.

“I really revel in their careers,” he says.

DeSimone also credits his students with encouraging his entrepreneurial efforts. The first company he launched with his students used CO2 to make a better solvent for dry cleaning clothes. A local North Carolina business invested $5 million to help start the company in exchange for half interest in the new venture.

“I learned a lot in that process. I realized that I could control my own destiny,” he says.

At the same time, DeSimone and his students had developed an environmentally friendly process to make Teflon. “But we had licensed it to DuPont exclusively,” he says.

joe DeSimone DeSimone quickly realized that, because of entrenched interests at DuPont, what he knew could be an environmentally transformational process was never going to be fully implemented. The experience, coupled with the success of the dry cleaning project, sealed his resolve to control his own destiny in the future.

“I think that’s what drove my entrepreneurial career,” he says.

Since those early experiences, DeSimone has cofounded Bioabsorbable Vascular Solutions, a company that makes polymer-based, biodegradable stents which was acquired by Guidant and then ultimately commercialized by Abbott; and Liquidia Technologies, a clinical biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of human therapeutics using the powerful nanomolding technique PRINT developed by the DeSimone Research Group at UNC. PRINT enables the fabrication of particles with precise control over the shape, size, composition and surface functionality. Liquidia had a successful IPO on the NASDAQ in the fall of 2018.

UNC has not only supported and recognized DeSimone’s entrepreneurial activities over the years, but called on him to help revise and codify the university’s policies and procedures regarding entrepreneurship and conflict-of-interest management.

“It was all about engaging a broad group of people, talking through the challenges and—back to my liberal arts upbringing—bringing communities together to talk through the issues and engaging different groups. Over time, we came up with policies and procedures that ended up giving UNC a well-written, well-documented, clear and balanced approach.”

DeSimone’s latest startup, Carbon, launched in 2013 with the audacious goal of developing a 3D printing process fast enough to create a new category: 3D manufacturing.

The biggest knock on 3D printing has always been that it’s slow. “3D printing is a bit of a misnomer. It’s 2D printing over and over and over again,” DeSimone says.

Carbon came up with a new process, fusing light and oxygen to rapidly produce products from a pool of liquid resin. It showed such promise that the company soon moved from North Carolina to Silicon Valley, with DeSimone going on sabbatical from the university to serve as CEO.

The company has continued to develop innovative technology, including a software-controlled chemical reaction that both speeds up the process further and makes parts that have great surface quality, uniform properties in all directions, and can be printed from materials with properties best suited to the parts’ use.

Innovation and bringing people together across disciplines have been hallmarks of DeSimone’s career, something he traces back to his days as an undergraduate student at Ursinus.

 “Diversity of thought is a fundamental tenet of innovation,” he said at Ursinus in October. “It is a key part of who we are and it’s the only way we’re going to solve some of the problems facing our society. Ursinus brings people together in that way. We learn the most from those we have the least in common with.”

He is one of a select few to be elected to all three branches of the U.S. National Academies: the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Among his many honors, DeSimone was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama in 2016. More recently, he received the 2018 National Academy of Sciences Award for Convergent Science, which comes with a $350,000 prize. The prestigious award was presented to DeSimone for his breakthroughs to improve human health, including 3D printed dentures approved by the FDA, nanomedicines for cancer therapy, drug delivery devices that can be implanted and tailored to a patient’s needs, and an inhalable pulmonary vaccine platform that can be used to target diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia.

In accepting the award, DeSimone noted that it “raises awareness of the importance of the integration of knowledge from the life and physical sciences, as well as disciplines in engineering and other areas, including the humanities and social sciences.”

desimone at the dedication of the IDC He announced that the prize money would be donated to The Institute for Convergent Science at Carolina and Ursinus College’s Innovation and Discovery Center (IDC) a new interdisciplinary facility that, for the first time in the college’s history, combines science, policy and entrepreneurship under one roof (link).

At the IDC’s dedication ceremony in October 2018, DeSimone told attendees, “Solutions to some of the most complicated problems we have today involve disciplines coming together. We do that well here at Ursinus, where a broader contextual understanding—a quest—happens. That’s where the frontier is now.” 

For DeSimone, the quest he began at Ursinus continues to push into bold new frontiers of innovation and technology. And there is no final frontier in sight. 

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