Dr. Anita L. Arduini has been hired recently to be the Program Manager for Carbon Management Canada. In this position she will be involved in the following activities:
- Development of funding programs and leveraging opportunities related to emissions reduction;
- Working with our practitioner partners to enhance the transfer of research results to practice and/or commercialization with the expected result of reducing emissions;
- Maintaining contact with existing industry and stakeholder groups to establish/clarify expectations;
- Identifying, contacting and integrating into CMC new industrial and governmental partners, both national and international; and
- Enhancing collaboration between all of our partners through innovative networking tools, processes and activities.
For the past four years, Anita was the Executive Director Research for the Schulich School of Engineering at the University of Calgary. In that position she was responsible for leadership in the development of programs, initiatives, polices and linkages to enhance the research enterprise of the school. She has in-depth knowledge of the Alberta provincial and federal funding programs – for example the NSERC Discovery Grant program, NSERC Industrial Research Chair program, NSERC Partnership programs, and Alberta Innovates Industrial Associates Program.
Previous to this position, she was employed for approximately 25 years in the Petrochemical industry, the last 8 years of 22 years with NOVA Chemicals Corporation as a Technology Business Development Manager with responsibilities for technology analysis, licensing, contract negotiation and commercialization.
Anita has these comments about the commercialization process:
“Introducing and testing new technology into an operating plant environment must be done in a manner that respects the concerns of the plant operators and personnel with regard to maintaining the integrity of the commercial operational units while operating in a safe manner for all concerned.” Developing results from the laboratory to the commercial market requires skillful scaling-up of experimental results from the lab to demonstration units to commercial production. She notes that the development process takes time, perseverance and lots of resources.
She has successfully licensed technology, but not without challenges. She describes her licensing experience like this:
“There is a continuum from ‘a piece of coal’ to the ‘Hope diamond.’ Your researchers are convinced that their technology is the equivalent of the Hope diamond and should be valued as such. On the other hand, the potential licensee views the technology as a lump of coal or even the primordial sludge before the coal, needing extensive development and therefore worth considerably less.”
Anita became immersed in all things related to greenhouse gases when she attended the GHGT10 conference in Amsterdam in September 2010.
She looks forward to using her extensive contacts in the academic, government and industrial communities combined with her interest in carbon management to forge new relationships and initiatives within CMC, while strengthening existing associations.