Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Denise Cobb, interim provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, today announced a new partnership for with the T-REX Innovation Center located in downtown St. Louis. The partnership will provide new opportunities for SIUE faculty and students to connect with the burgeoning entrepreneurial community in the St. Louis region.
SIUE expects to begin fully utilizing the T-REX facilities and programming in early September. Graduate students form the SIUE School of Business, and the College of Arts and Sciences will also intern with T-REX in the innovation center. The agreement is for one year with automatic renewals.
“The partnership will provide SIUE faculty, staff and students access to T-REX’s resources that support start-up companies, and the opportunity to network with potential investors and other entrepreneurs,” said Jerry Weinberg, SIUE associate provost and dean of the Graduate School.
Weinberg said the goal is to foster and support entrepreneurship of SIUE’s faculty, staff and students. “Moving SIUE discoveries and inventions from the lab to the commercial market is the public’s return-on-investment for supporting the University’s mission of scholarship,” he added. “These new commercial products help to spur our economy and, potentially, improve our quality of life.”
Patricia Hagen is the president and executive director of T-REX. “We are thrilled to include SIUE as one of our university partners in T-REX,” she said. “Strong relationships with our great universities in the region help to seed and grow the elements of the regional economy that are focused on innovation, and offer great opportunities for both students and faculty to connect to other great minds in the region.”
T‐REX is a world-class venue providing the startup entrepreneur with low cost and flexible enterprise space, while serving the region with quality programming and inspiring community. It is a non-profit organization that was founded by the St. Louis Regional Chamber, St. Louis Development Corp., the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership and DowntownSTL. T-REX owns the historic Lammert Building on Washington Ave. and is growing.
It now serves more than 180 companies along with iTEN, Arch Grants, the Veterans Business Resource Center, the Small Business Technology Development Center, Cultivation Capital, SixThirty, SixThirty Cyber, Prosper and Stadia.
T-REX’s goal is to increase the vitality of the regional economy by recruiting and nurturing startup companies that advance technological development, encourage creative thinking through design and employ highly skilled workers that will contribute to the economic development of St. Louis.
About T-REX
Like a magnet, T-REX attracts innovation to downtown St. Louis while it serves the entire St. Louis region. T-REX offers space and programming where ideas are conceived and brought to fruition. The T-REX community serves as a network of creativity, where abstraction finds clarity amongst a collection of bright and dedicated minds. T-REX is now home to a growing community of entrepreneurs, developers, designers, mentors, educators and more. T-REX welcomes all ambitious minds.