Jonathon Lawrie, Ph.D.
Jonathon Lawrie, Ph.D., joined the North Carolina Biotechnology Center June 1, 2011 as executive director of the Western Office.
Lawrie is an educator, entrepreneur and scientist whose career has included R&D and management at major pharmaceutical companies as well as the co-founding of several biotechnology companies.
Lawrie was assistant professor at the Western Carolina University College of Business’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation before joining the Biotech Center to oversee its activities in the 25-county region.
A native of Michigan, Lawrie earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of California, Irvine, and graduate degrees in microbiology and immunology from the University of Washington, Seattle.
After a two-year stint in postdoctoral research with the famed father of recombinant DNA commercialization, Herbert Boyer, Ph.D., at the University of California, San Francisco, Lawrie co-founded his first biotech firm in California: Codon.
From 1985 to 2000 he worked with several large corporations in business development and product commercialization, including Amoco, Roche Diagnostic Systems, Cardiovascular Diagnostics and Becton Dickinson Technologies.
In 2000 he became president and co-founder of StemCo Biomedical in Durham, and six years later helped found Raleigh vaccine developer Arbovax.
Lawrie brought his business experience to North Carolina’s leading bioscience community college system in 2006, assuming management of the BioBusiness Center at the Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College. Three years later he joined the faculty of WCU in Cullowhee, where he concurrently earned a Master of Entrepreneurship degree.
He has served on many corporate and community boards and committees, including the Advisory Committee for Biotechnology in Western North Carolina; NCBIO; the North Carolina Natural Products Association; the Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED); the American / Amsterdam Business Club; and the American Chamber of Commerce, Netherlands.
