Daily Business Report: Thursday, Aug. 5, 2021
Mapped: The State of Small Business Recovery in America
Visual Capitalist
In the business news cycle, headlines are often dominated by large corporations, macroeconomic news, or government action.
While mom and pop might not always be in focus, collectively small businesses are a powerful and influential piece of the economy. In fact, 99.9 percent of all businesses in the U.S. qualify as small businesses, collectively employing almost half (47.3 percent) of the nation’s private workforce.
Unfortunately, they’ve also been one of the hardest-hit sectors of the economy amid the pandemic. From the CARES Act to the new budget proposal, billions of dollars have been allocated towards helping small businesses to get back on their feet.
Small Business Recovery in 50 Metro Areas
During the pandemic, many small businesses have either swiftly pivoted to survive, or struggled to stay afloat. This map pulls data from Opportunity Insights to examine the small business recovery rate in 50 metro areas across America.
According to this data, San Diego had a business closure rate of 38 percent as of April 23, 2021, compared to a closure rate of 28 percent as of Sept. 25, 2020.
Above photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.
State provides $35 million for renovation
of historic Educational Cultural Complex theater
The San Diego College of Continuing Education’s Educational Cultural Complex is the beneficiary of a $35 million renovation grant included in the 2021-22 California State Budget. The funds will be used to restore the historic theater inside the Educational Cultural Complex.
The College of Continuing Education is the fourth division of the San Diego Community College District (SDCCD), providing free higher education and workforce training to adults in San Diego since 1914.
The $35 million grant for ECC’s Common Ground Theatre, one of the three oldest African American Theatre companies in the nation, is included in funding allocated for libraries and education by the California Department of Finance and the office of Senate President pro Tempore Toni Atkins.
“Renovations will include updated entries and foyerareas plus a new control room,” said Jacqueline Sabanos, vice president of administrative services at SDCCE who will oversee and lead the committee that will hire a design team to develop renderings and plans.
USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center
in partnership with Sanford Burnham Prebys
To accelerate the development of groundbreaking cancer treatments, the Rosalie and Harold Rae Brown Center for Cancer Drug Development (CCDD) at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Keck School of Medicine announces its first strategic partnership with Sanford Burnham Prebys in San Diego.
Under this agreement, USC researchers will collaborate with scientists at the Institute’s Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics (Prebys Center) to transition clinically relevant targets to early-stage drug discovery, including assay development and high-throughput screening to identify chemical compounds that modulate the activity of the targets. The Prebys Center is a comprehensive center for drug discovery and chemical biology and is fully equipped and staffed to conduct world-class drug discovery research..
Darren Liponi named new faculty
director of IDEA Engineering Student Center
NanoEngineering Professor Darren Lipomi has been named the new faculty director of the IDEA Engineering Student Center at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. His appointment began July 1, 2021.
Lipomi has been involved with the IDEA Center in various roles since he joined UC San Diego in 2012, including organizing 36 seminars in the Graduate and Postdoc Scholarly Talk Series.
Lipomi will build on the momentum and achievements that the IDEA Engineering Student Center has made over the last sixyears under the leadership of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Oliva Graeve.
At the Jacobs School, Lipomi is known for his ability to create inclusive research and learning environments for his students inside and outside the lab. In 2017, he received a campus Diversity Champion award
In terms of research, Lipomi is a world leader in thin film electronic materials, whose applications include solar energy and artificial touch
Calibr partners with Wellcome Trust to
create consortium for neglected tropical diseases
Calibr, the drug development division of Scripps Research, has partnered with Wellcome to launch the Integrated Drug Discovery Consortium for Neglected Tropical Diseases (IDDC-NTD). The three-year, $24 million grant will support Calibr in leveraging innovative approaches to address some of the most challenging neglected tropical diseases across the globe.
The initiative is part of Wellcome’s HIT NTD Flagship, which supports the development of exciting new products, technologies and other interventions to prevent or treat disease. The IDDC-NTD will harness Calibr’s existing drug discovery capabilities to advance medicines for a variety of pathogens pervasive in low-resource regions of the world.
“We’re very excited and thankful to partner with Wellcome to broaden our global health program and target important pathogens that collectively inflict a devasting toll on world morbidity and mortality,” said Case McNamara, director of Infectious Diseases at Calibr.
General Atomics-trained researcher to
receive the 2021 Thomas H. Stix Award
Prof. Carlos Paz-Soldan has been selected to receive the American Physical Society’s (APS’s) 2021 Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research.
Paz-Soldan is the eighth person to receive the prestigious award, which is conferred annually by the APS in recognition of outstanding theoretical, experimental, computational, or technical contributions in plasma physics.
The APS citation recognizes his “groundbreaking contributions and scientific leadership in the understanding of non-axisymmetric magnetic fields and relativistic electrons in tokamak plasmas.”
Prof. Paz-Soldan arrived on-site at General Atomics in 2012 as a postdoctoral researcher. Working predominantly at the DIII-D tokamak facility, operated by General Atomics, Paz-Soldan studied how small adjustments to the tokamak magnetic field can be used to induce displacements in the plasma that control the loss of heat and help maintain stability of the plasma.
Paz-Soldan joined the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at the start of this year.
Fern Street Circus kicks off Neighborhood
Tour with performances starting Aug. 8
Fern Street Circus will kick off its Annual Neighborhood Tour on Sunday, Aug. 8 at Bay Terrace Park and Community Center in San Diego. Running on weekends through Aug. 29, the series of free, public performances at San Diego neighborhood parks showcases the talents of professional artists from around the world alongside local students from Fern Street Circus’s free after-school program in City Heights.
Fern Street Circus has partnered with the City of San Diego’s Parks and Recreation Department, San Diego Parks Foundation and HHSA/Live Well San Diego to put on seven shows during the month of August at a variety of neighborhood parks, including the communities of San Ysidro, Linda Vista, Southcrest, Barrio Logan, City Heights and more. The shows will move to a new park each Saturday and Sunday, with FSC performances starting at 2 p.m. The series of events will also include dance performances from Maraya Performing Arts, as well as food, arts and crafts and more, for a full day of family fun in the park.
Navy’s new Triton drone close to taking
over for older patrol aircraft
Military.com
The Navy’s new MQ-4C Triton drones hit a new development milestone last week, the Navy’s project manager announced Tuesday.
Capt. Dan Mackin, the naval program manager for the Triton program, said that a new configuration of the drone, loaded with more sensors, had its first flight last Thursday over Southern Maryland. The drone’s newly installed cameras and signals intelligence collection systems “are performing better than expected at this point,” Mackin said at a press conference at the annual Sea Air Space conference.
The Northrop Grumman-made unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV — an enhanced variant of the RQ-4 Global Hawk — is part of the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance program and boasts next-generation sensors specially engineered for seafaring operations.
Tower 16 Capital Partners acquires
2-property portfolio in Moreno Valley
San Diego-based Tower 16 Capital Partners has acquired a two-property multifamily portfolio consisting of 504 units in Moreno Valley, Calif. for $107.2 million. The Sienna Pointe Apartments project consists of 384 units built in 1985 while the Heacock Park Apartments includes 120 units built in 1971. The properties were acquired from a private seller in an off-market transaction.
Tower 16 will be overseeing close to $10 million in upgrades and renovations at both properties.
Illumina donates $1 million to Mumbai
Illumina Inc. has donated $1 million in sequencing capabilities to the Molecular Diagnostic Reference Laboratory at Kasturba Hospital, in the Municipal Corporate of Greater Mumbai, to help expand SARS-CoV-2 sequencing capabilities in the region and support the broader genomic surveillance effort across India.
Kasturba Hospital was the first hospital in Mumbai to begin sequencing SARS-CoV-2 this year and will examine how variants of the virus are being spread across India.
The donation includes two of Illumina’s newest next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms, the NextSeq 2000, reagents, a rapid bioinformatics analysis platform (DRAGEN) and four years of service support for the sequencing installations.
Elizabeth Swift joins Bank of Southern
California as a senior vice president
Bank of Southern California N.A., a commercial bank headquartered in San Diego, announced the appointment of Elizabeth Swift as senior vice president, commercial real estate lender. Based out of the company’s San Diego Regional Commercial Banking Office, she will be responsible for originating and managing a portfolio of commercial real estate loans.
Swift is a seasoned and accomplished banking professional with more than 15 years of industry experience and a deep understanding of building and growing CRE opportunities. Most recently, she served as vice president, senior loan officer of the Construction Lending Division at Bank of Marin where she was responsible for originating, underwriting, and closing new commercial real estate construction loans, in addition to managing an existing portfolio.
