Wayne Merkelson: Volunteering for the Plantations and Life Sciences

Wayne Merkelson ’73, JD ’75 has served the class for many years on the nominations committee and by helping to achieve Tower Club records in Reunion years. Here he describes his volunteer work for the Cornell Plantations and the McGovern Family Center for Venture Development in the Life Sciences.

I got involved with the Plantations at their request, to be on the Advisory Council starting April 2014.  I had refused to serve until I retired from Novartis, due to time commitments.   Nancy [Roistacher ’72, Wayne’s wife] and I have always been interested in helping the Plantations, and have been steady donors for more than twenty years.   I continue to serve on the Advisory Council, a three-year term.   I do not know how the work will evolve over time, but the Plantations needs younger alumni involvement, so I have also been involved in recruiting new advisory council members from younger alumni classes.

I got involved with the McGovern Family Center for Venture Development in the Life Sciences at the request of Dean Kathryn Boor, after discussing my career history and background with her and with some other Cornell senior administration members, and expressing my continuing interest to help Cornell create and nurture start-ups in the life sciences.  When I retired from Novartis, I believed I would have the time to become a mentor for one or more companies in the Incubator at the McGovern Center in Weill Hall at Cornell.  I applied to be a mentor in 2014, and was accepted.   I signed a mentor contract with Cornell, which includes confidentiality and other provisions to protect the University appropriately as well as myself.  I currently mentor one company quite actively (ZYMtronix) and have met with and assisted two others thus far.  My previous career creating or supporting start-ups with Novartis, and performing due diligences, then negotiating and drafting agreements with third parties (in my M&A and Licensing support functions) and then my Corporate Governance functions of creating, structuring and running companies made this a natural fit.  I am assisting Lou Walcer ’74, who runs the McGovern incubator, and a team within CALS under Dean Boor to identify potential start-up teams and technologies with the applicable research teams at Cornell, and expect this to expand over time as we show success in driving new teams to the McGovern life sciences incubator.

This has been an extraordinary exercise for me, seeing the workings of the University from another angle, and assisting driving them to success at start-ups.  I believe the Dyson School and the Johnson School as well as the Cornell patent and licensing teams will become more integrated into this search and development effort for the future as it continues to show promise and evolves.  I believe the Cornell culture in this area is evolving rapidly for a positive benefit to Tompkins County in creating and retaining jobs, to the Southern Tier in New York, and to New York State as a whole; and I also believe this will drive significant value back to Cornell, returning to Cornell more investment dollars, more research funding, and more profit-sharing from the successes.