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Health Care and Biotech Talents Earn Top Spots

Editor’s note: Tom York is on vacation; his column will return next week. Our new Editor-in-Chief, Nels Jensen, is filling in this week and will soon be writing this column on a regular basis.

The Corporate Directors Forum’s Director of the Year awards Sept. 22 at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla revealed a telling bias about our business community. Each of the six honorees were in health care/biotech. OK, we get it; that’s where the action is. The honorees were: Frederick T. Muto of Isis Pharmaceuticals Inc.; Kathleen Sellick of Rady Children’s Hospital; John Kozarich of Ligand Pharmaceuticals Inc.; Susan Salka of AMN Healthcare; Gerald Proehl of Santarus Inc.; and Lifetime Achievement honoree Karin Eastham of Illumina Inc., Geron, Veracyte and many other companies. That’s quite an accomplished group. But when you hang with the CDF crowd, you often are among amazing people.

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While you were going about your business on Friday, Samsung had a full day of 50-minute pitches from up-and-coming startups. It wasn’t just one or two scouts from Samsung but about a dozen executives from various areas of the company. The program is called “Marketlink” and is the much less publicized arm of CommNexus. Marketlink has proven to be an efficient way for connecting multinational giants with tech newcomers who go through a rigorous vetting process. Verizon comes to town in October. Huawei, ZTE and SK Telecom were recent partners.

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About 55 students make up the Rady School of Management’s first class in their new Masters of Finance degree program. Dean Robert Sullivan describes the curriculum as a sort of financial engineering with an emphasis on data. We’re talking about forecasting models, risk management, econometrics, that sort of thing. Up next is a one-year specialty degree in advance business analytics. Sullivan says about 40 percent of the advanced business analyst jobs are unfilled. The growth of the innovative business school at University of California, San Diego in only 11 years is amazing, in large part because of the laserlike focus on unmet and future needs of the business community.

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Speaking of degrees, Ashford University of San Diego-based Bridgepoint Education — built on the premise that you can earn a degree online, anywhere, anytime — is hosting two commencement ceremonies Sunday, Oct. 5, at the San Diego Convention Center. It’s virtually guaranteed to be a success.

Editor-in-Chief Nels Jensen can be reached via njensen@sdbj.com or 858-277-6897.

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