Matthew Engel

On Oct. 25, 2009 the Fundamentals of the Bioscience Program Alumni Organization launched its official alumni website: fobip.org/alumni. The Fundamentals of the Bioscience Industry Program is a semester long collaborative course covering information critical for students to prevail in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and business worlds. Graduate students are able to hear and watch seasoned professionals from both start-up and established companies describe their career paths and discuss their business models. The program has an excellent reputation for producing bright, motivated students who have been extremely successful in their careers.

The target audience for the alumni website is professionals working in the biotech and pharma industries. I wanted to create a resource that would feature useful articles from alumni and guest authors with experience relevant to program graduates. One of my goals was to put a spotlight on the alumni and draw attention to the high caliber of its course instructors, graduates, and applicants. We hope to feature articles covering the the financial industry, venture capital, intellectual property, technology transfer, recruiting, and academia in relation to biotechnology. We want to provide information that will be useful to the start-up entrepreneur, industry veteran, and job seeker. Without any advertising we have had already 1,000’s of page views and hundreds of unique visitors. I am hoping that the content we generate will be a useful resource and we are aiming to add interviews and new articles approximately every 2 weeks.

I dreamed up this concept in early Summer 2009 and discussed it with Kate Posnanski, Manager of Programs at the Center for Biotechnology. With the help of many program alumni such as Jenne Relucio and Banke Fagbemi, we were able to bring the project to fruition and launch the website this Fall. I decided to use my experience creating websites use Wordpress to generate the blog format with some additional features. We have an alumni page we are trying to build on every day featuring over a dozen of our graduates.

On the techie side, I used Wordpress as my publishing platform with the Red Evo News Blue theme from Red Evolution installed. This theme evens offers a modest support forum which was able to answer some of my questions about theme customizations about controlling the length of the except. The except is the text displayed on the homepage describing the content of an article in brief. Also, I took advantage of using custom fields for the first time. Before creating this site, custom fields were a complete mystery to me. I found this video tutorial EXTREMELY helpful, and now I use the custom field to display images on the homepage for each post. There are both thumbnail and featured image custom fields available, built into the Red Evo News Blue theme. This was also the first time I embedded a Google Calendar into a website. That part was extremely simple, and if you want to know how to do that check here.

In summary, I hope to continue building this special website, which I hold dear to my heart and hope it will bring alot of benefit to the Fundamentals Program and its graduates. Cheers!