Legislators Visit VGCC Biotech Facility At Franklin County Campus
The “Legislative Listen & Learn” tour visited Vance-Granville Community College’s Franklin County Campus Monday, Aug. 18.
A dozen first-term Democratic members of the North Carolina House of Representatives were invited to Louisburg by Rep. Lucy Allen, and one of their stops was the Biotechnology Center at the VGCC campus.
President Robert A. Miller welcomed the legislators to the college and told them Vance-Granville’s enrollment has grown 50 percent in the past five years, and the school is now the 12th largest among the 59 in the state Community College System.
Miller also told the lawmakers about the BioWork training conducted at the Franklin Campus the past two years in the state-of-the-art lab and how two sessions had to be added this fall, bringing the total to five, to help accommodate the high demand for the class. He also spoke of the cooperative effort with Novozymes North America, the N.C. Biotechnology Center and the N.C. Community College System, which made the Biotechnology Center possible.
Novozymes President Lee Yarbrough said when his company built its plant near Franklinton 20 years ago, its main concern was workforce preparedness and the need for technical training for its employees. “I don’t believe Novozymes would have developed as it has without Vance-Granville Community College,” he said.
Yarbrough and JoAnne Steiner, Novozymes Corporate Facilitator, added that the company’s $200 million expansion a few years ago was only possible because of the assistance given by Vance-Granville Community College in training its workers.
Novozymes has given money, equipment and the expertise of its professional staff toward development of the BioWork program taught at VGCC. Yarbrough said, “What we’ve done has not just been for Novo, but for all of North Carolina and the biotechnology industry.”
Dan Newberry, an engineer with Novozymes who is an instructor in the VGCC BioWork Program, gave the legislators a demonstration of a biotech tank in the lab that is used in training. The computer-controlled tank duplicates the bioprocess procedures in a chemical, pharmaceutical or biotechnology plant.
The Franklin County stop was one of 16 legislative districts that the freshman Democrats were to visit on the tour.
Dan Newberry, a Novozymes engineer and instructor in the Vance-Granville Community College BioWork Program, demonstrates equipment in the VGCC Biotechnology Center at the Franklin County Campus to 12 freshman Democratic legislators who visited the campus Aug. 18. The House members were on the “Listen & Learn Tour.”
