Business

2013-march-april-1859-magazine-corvallis-oregon-creative-xihou-yin-scientist

Xihou Yin: Scientist

A new biotech company in Corvallis, AGAE Technologies, makes ecofriendly products that may change the world by helping clean up contaminated sites and toxic waste dumps, simultaneously boosting yields from older oil wells. Senior research scientist Xihou Yin, Ph.D., of Oregon State University’s College of Pharmacy, identified a strain of bacteria that produces molecules called rhamnolipid biosurfactants. These molecules have widespread applications, including removal of heavy metals from contaminated soils and recovering hardto- extract oil from mature wells. Rhamnolipids also offer biodegradable green solutions for cosmetics, shampoo and soaps, as well as organic food production and pharmaceuticals. Yin, who came to OSU in 1997, and his team at AGAE (American Green Agricultural and Environmental) Technologies, were the first to work out an efficient and cost-effective process to produce highly purified rhamnolipids in large quantities. This had eluded researchers worldwide since 1949, when rhamnolipids were originally discovered. Researchers have long sought…

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Heather Straw: Jewelry designer

Jewelry designer, mom and business woman extraordinaire, designer Heather Straw was selling about $1,000 a month in handmade jewelry when she attended a trade show in Las Vegas in 2005. In two days, she sold $43,000 and knew that her life was about to change. “I was a young mom, I’d just lost my shop in downtown Bend, and I was terrified about the future,” she says. “I gave my boyfriend, now my husband, the stack of orders, and we started filling them in our home.” Nashelle Jewelry soon had five employees working in her living room. In 2006, she leased an industrial-sized bay on Bend’s east side to house a showroom and work area. The business grew at warp speed, today encompassing six industrial bays and twenty to thirty employees, depending on the season. More than 400 boutiques worldwide carry the Nashelle and Nash (for men) lines. Nashelle rings,…

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Margarette Leite & Sergio Palleroni: Sustainable architects

Margarette Leite and her husband, Sergio Palleroni, were already looking into ways to make schools more sustainable when their daughter started fourth grade in a portable classroom at Portland’s Sunnyside Environmental School. A lot of the parents were concerned about putting their kids in a portable classroom for the year. There were air quality issues and the potential for “sick building syndrome,” an illness thought to be related to chemical contaminants and inadequate ventilation. Architects and Portland State University professors both, Leite and her husband set out to remedy the problem by designing affordable and sustainable portable classrooms. In 2009, at the university, they convened a day of activism called Rethinking the Portable Classroom. “We kind of threw everything at the topic,” says Leite. Out of this came a prototype with solar-powered ventilation, larger windows for day-lighting, low- and no-VOC finishes, and sheet rock that actively converts VOCs into safe…

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Jo Hamilton: Crochet artist

A wall of yarn is her palette, a steel hook her brush. With these, Portland artist Jo Hamilton crochets a new twist on an ancient craft with elaborate cityscapes and portraits that unravel crochet as granny craft. By painting in yarn, Scottish-born Hamilton, 41, blends fine art training from the Glasgow School of Art with the craft she learned from her “gran.” She moved to Portland in 1996, and painted in oil and watercolor for almost twenty years, but says, “I hadn’t found my medium.” In 2006, inspiration struck at a nontraditional show of tapestry, sewing and embroidery at the Contemporary Craft Museum (now the Museum of Contemporary Craft). She went home, picked up the crochet hook and began a cityscape of Portland that took years to complete. Next were the portraits—friends, coworkers and even dogs. “Portland excites and inspires me to do unsanctioned things and not think about what…

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Robert Henry Oshatz: Architect

If you want to experience a rush without any drugs, turn your browser to oshatz.com. Enter the wondrous world of Portland architect Robert Harvey Oshatz. You might think you’ve fallen into the rabbit hole. Each is a commissioned piece of art—a place that people live, work or go to worship. Oshatz designs around “the poetry of a site” and the personality of the client. Some structures are flowing and sensuous, others sharp and edgy. “When the building is at peace with the environment, the people inside are at peace,” he says. The client is the reason for the project, he emphasizes. “I try to give the client everything he wants rather than imposing how I want to live in the space. All dreams should be fulfilled.” His own Portland home is shaped like a ship’s bow, built in the 1980s on a steep hillside overlooking the Willamette River. The interior…

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Scott Henry: Trellis System Designer

Syndi Henry Beavers tells the story of going wine tasting with her dad, Scott Henry. After the tour, her dad handed his credit card to the young man behind the counter to buy wine. The man glanced at the name on it and said, “Did you know there’s a trellis system named for Scott Henry?” “Almost immediately, the light went on,” Beavers says. “He [the cashier] was so excited that Scott Henry was standing in front of him, he pulled a book off the shelves and showed my dad the well-thumbed page marked with the Henry trellis system.” In 1972, Henry planted grapes on his family homestead in the Umpqua Valley near Roseburg—the start of Henry Estate Winery, one of Oregon’s oldest. Educated at Oregon State University as an engineer, Henry’s background proved helpful in the early years, when the vineyards produced a crowded bunch of grapes that were prone…

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Amplify with Style

Portland’s Carbon Audio wants to make your device ‘louderer.’