EERC promotes Carsten Heide Carsten Heide, head of the Energy & Environmental Research Center’s (EERC’s) technology commercialization efforts, has been promoted to associate director for Intellectual Property Management and Technology Commercialization. “Carsten has successfully advanced the intellectual property and commercialization activities for the EERC and the EERC Foundation over the past year and a half, which sets our capabilities in this area to a very high level in the nation,” said EERC Director Gerald Groenewold. “He has a great deal of global expertise in technology commercialization and has brought tremendous business opportunities forward. His intelligence, vision, and enthusiastic leadership have been key factors to this success.” Dr. Heide was hired at the EERC in June 2005 as a deputy associate director. He is responsible for enhancing strategic collaborative relationships with EERC clients, identifying relevant intellectual property for the EERC Foundation, commercializing technologies, and leading long-range strategic planning based on EERC technology assets in the global market. “I am very proud to be a part of the EERC and owe very much to all of our employees for their constant support, great enthusiasm, and market-driven ideas,” said Heide. “Without our incredible, entrepreneurial people, I would not have had the opportunity to succeed. Even more importantly, they have made me feel at home in North Dakota.” Prior to joining the EERC, Heide was the head of business development and licensing for ipal GmbH, an intellectual property asset management firm in Berlin, Germany. Prior to that, Heide worked as a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group. He also worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at New York University with the Department of Physics, in collaboration with IBM, and at the Institute of Radio-Engineering and Electronics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Heide received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Oxford University. He studied physics at the State University of St. Petersburg in Russia and at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He is fluent in German, Russian, and English. -- EERC.