With plans to spend $23 million on a new research facility, the University of Illinois is a great market for lab suppliers hoping to increase laboratory equipment sales and market university lab equipment at life science marketing events. Construction will begin on the University of Illinois’s biofuel research lab this fall, and the lab will be used to research biomass-derived biofuels like cellulosic ethanol. According to Biomass Magazine, funding will come from the Illinois Capital Development Board. The lab is expected to be completed in 18 months after construction begins.
The News Gazette reports that the University of Illinois has been planning the 43,000-square-foot facility since the fall of 2006. The building’s funding was approved years before state legislators approved a capital funding plan in 2009. The biofuel research lab will accommodate companies that pay $10,000 a year for access to faculty expertise, internships for master’s students, the pilot plant, annual networking conferences, an online class and bioenergy class presentations. DuPont Industrial Biosciences and Novozymes have already partnered with the lab.
"Industry needs to have something that they can grab hold of, that they can see at a somewhat larger scale and evaluate at a larger scale," said Hans Blaschek, director of the University of Illinois’s Center for BioEnergy Research and a professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition.
The biofuel research lab will be house biotechnology, fermenting, corn milling and soybean processing laboratories. Fermenters will be no bigger than 300 liters, so they will produce a few gallons of fuel. The facility will be built up to LEED standards.
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Lab suppliers hoping to market university lab equipment and increase laboratory equipment sales in Illinois may be interested in the University of Illinois’s latest NIH and NSF funding statistics. In 2012, the NIH awarded the university $71.1 million in research funding, while the NSF gave the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign $7.7 million in research funding for life science projects. The NSF funding was distributed among a number of disciplines in the life science field, including global systems science, evolutionary processes clusters, plant genome research, molecular biophysics, bioinformatics, macrosystem biology, cellular dynamics and function, genetic mechanisms, systems and synthetic biology, and systematics and biodiversity science.
If you are a lab supplier interested in marketing university lab equipment and increasing laboratory equipment sales within the well-funded market at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Biotechnology Calendar, Inc. invites you to attend our annual Urbana-Champaign Bioresearch Product Faire™ Event. Last year, the Urbana-Champaign BioResearch Product Faire™ Event attracted 356 attendees. Of those attending, 76 were purchasing agents, professors and post docs, and 30 were lab managers. Those who attended this life science marketing event came from 36 different research buildings and 43 departments around campus.
For more information on our Urbana-Champaign Bioresearch Product Faire™ Event or to view more funding statistics for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, click on the button below. If you’re interested in attending a life science marketing event closer to home, we encourage you to view our 2013 calendar of events.