Published: September 19, 2007 09:50 pm            

Upstarts and Innovators: A scientist – and entrepreneur

Don’t bother suggesting that Richard Somiari is a businessman. He’ll disagree.

That was the message Somiari delivered to a collection of Pitt-Johnstown students recently as he kicked off this year’s Upstarts and Innovators series.

That might have been difficult for the students to believe given that Somiari’s company, ITSI Biosciences, is constructing a $1.8 million facility in Johnstown’s Kernville neighborhood.

“I am not businessman,” Somiari said. “I am a scientist.”

Technically speaking, Somiari is correct, and he has the resume to prove it.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in microbiology, a master’s in enzyme technology and doctorates in biochemistry and molecular biology.

Somiari worked at his passion as an assistant professor at the University of Calabra in Nigeria, his country of origin.

He continued that while doing postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland.

What finally brought him to the region was the opportunity to play an integral role in the development of Windber Research Institute, where he served as its first chief scientific officer.

While he had the resume to work just about anywhere he chose, Somiari said the lure of WRI was the ability to do work that wasn’t being conducted anywhere else in the world.

“I hear from headhunters monthly because I am always out giving presentations to different organizations,” Somiari said. “After each one, I end up getting some offers.”

But Somiari admits that he always has been an entrepreneur at heart.

The desire to accomplish more than he can working for someone else has driven him to take on a huge debt when he could be comfortably eyeing a test tube while collecting an even more comfortable wage.

Somiari said that he has taken part in several entrepreneurial ventures, beginning before he left Nigeria.

On one, he teamed with a college roommate to develop, manufacture and package a better fish food right out of their apartment. He said, simply, that he saw an opportunity.

That’s what Somiari sees here – an opportunity that matches his passion.

That is why he pushes on to build his business rather than accepting one of those many offers that would afford him a more stable future.

“I believe in exploring,” Somiari said. “My dream is to build this company to the point that I can go back to looking at the tiny test tubes and doing experiments.

“I’m no salesperson. No scientist is a good businessperson, because we’re more interested in the science. We’re more intrigued by the challenge than the money.”

Another allure of WRI – and part of the reason he left his post there – was that the institute was established to spin off business.

Somiari made the choice to start his company partly in hopes that others will follow, he said.

“What we have here is a mix of industries that we can combine to create a new bioscience cluster,” Somiari said. “I see an opportunity where we can couple the advanced defense technologies being developed in the region with the health-care work being done here and create a whole new bioscience cluster.

“It is my dream that we will serve as the catalyst to bring new bioscience companies into the region.”

        

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