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This podcast episode features Rowan University leaders Tony Lowman and Nidhal Bouaynaya sharing their personal journeys, academic leadership, and entrepreneurial ventures. They discuss Rowan’s rapid innovation in AI, life sciences, VR education, and entrepreneurship. Themes include agility in academia, transforming South Jersey’s innovation ecosystem, and inspiring future-ready education and research.
Nidhal Bouaynaya: I'm the Associate Vice President for artificial Intelligence at Rowan University.
Tony Lowman: Great. And Tony? I am the Chancellor at Rowan University.
Jim Barrood: Great. Okay. Let's circle back to you, Nidhal. Tell us about your journey, how you got to this place in Rowan, in academia. Let's start with high school or even college.
Nidhal Bouaynaya: Sure. My journey is across three continents actually. High school. That was in Tunisia then that's in North Africa. Then undergrad. That was in France, that's Europe. And then graduate school here in the us. I wanted to go to academia because that's the only thing I wanted to do because I like research.
I like what I do, and I like to dig very deep and I like to solve problems.
Jim Barrood: And so after college, talk to us about, how you got to where you are now.
Nidhal Bouaynaya: So after college, again, I just wanted to be into academia. I like solving problems. I had the freedom of working on the fundamental problems that I'd like to work on.
I went right away actually from PhD into academia. I went first at the University of Arkansas. And then I came to Rowan because I wanted to move to the east coast. That is that's the truth. Then at Rowan I continued basically working on, early on days of machine learning.
At the time we called it big data, right? And I got Rowan's first high performance computer here. Started this big data early machine learning program here at Rowan, and then it slowly evolved into a bigger group actually here in the College of Engineering into machine learning and ai. Funded by national Science Foundation, Lockheed Martin, the FAA.
And then Rowan Tony, sorry, approached me into leadership position within the college of Engineering to be the associate dean for research. I. Jumped into the opportunity because it meant growing the research portfolio of the college, and of Rowan University. And it was actually a fun ride, right?
I worked with a number of faculty here across departments in engineering and outside of engineering as well. We grew the research portfolio actually, of the college. And then again, I was approached for this a VP for ai, which is a very important position. A lot of universities are actually having these positions.
So with ai not being is no more like a skill on the side, right? It is fundamentally shifting the landscape in education, in industry, in society. And we need to figure out how to navigate it basically in all institutions and especially in higher ed.
Jim Barrood: Fantastic. All right, Tony, talk to us about your journey.
I have a feeling you did not cross continents or cross oceans.
Tony Lowman: I did not. I did not. I grew up in southern Virginia. I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon. A couple things happened on my journey. First I took a class my senior year in high school. Where we got to go to anatomy labs at the local medical school.
And I fainted. But I didn't think much of it. And then my, my, my first year at the University of Virginia, I fainted again while giving blood. And someone said, this might not be the right idea for you. I picked another track. But I like biomedical engineering.
I like solving problems related to help. I like solving trying to come up with new solutions and things. So very much like Nadal. So you could probably see why we connected so well. So I became a chemical engineer since biomedical engineering wasn't in vogue at that point. Went through the process of, being a, being your typical undergrad.
In my last semester I did an honors thesis and I got to work with a PhD student and I thought, man, this is the cool thing in the world. What do you do? And he told me what he is doing. He was going to be a professor after he graduated. I thought, this is it. The challenge was it was a little late in the cycle, so I went and worked at a nuclear power plant.
For a year as an engineer and realized that wasn't for me. And I spent the year applying for graduate schools and that led me to Purdue and advisor who, you know he, he bases his research program value, I think, on the number of former students he puts into academia. Fantastic man, member of all the national academies.
I joined Drexel in Philadelphia. Spent 15 years there. I knew Ali Houshmand and he said, let's get the band back together and build up a really amazing research university here in South Jersey. And that's what I did. And I was Dean.
And then recently I've become chancellor.
Jim Barrood: So that's a great journey. And we're lucky to have you at Rowan, clearly. Tony so let's talk about. All the things that are going on at Rowan. I know it may take forever, but if you can encapsulate some of the major things relating to innovation at the school, at the university that'd be great.
Let's start with you, Tony, since you, you're the provost and you have a really wide perspective of. Everything going on.
Tony Lowman: Yeah, I'll give a, I don't want to talk forever. I could though. I think, I'll start with one thing that's very fresh is we just opened New Jersey's.
First School of Veterinary Medicine. It's what's incredible and I think exciting about that is my first conversation with the dean. The now dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine was in January of 2021. Still in the heart. O of the pandemic. I went down to his vet practice. We identified him.
Why? Because he, he had some ties to academic veterinary medicine. He was a national accreditor, but he also ran his four, four practices scattered out throughout New Jersey. So a bit of an entrepreneur, bit of a person who knows how things are going and. Within four years, we secured funding, we built the building, we've got a donor, and we just welcome 75 students who are in class right now.
A fantastic journey and to me that symbolizes, what we do at Rowan is, we identify the need for a region and we move quick and we're very good at, pulling people together to do these things. It takes state, private donor, university and some amazing people.
And again, tying that in, that ties into our really growth and health life sciences. So we've now become a life science educational leader with our three medical schools, our growing nursing program and all the other things in that pipeline, but also life sciences research, which. Is also very personally near and dear to my heart.
And I think our growth as a university in the area of life science has led to, to, I think one of the bigger things we're doing as well is our strategic innovation center that we're building out with Cooper Health and a number of partners in the area. It was just announced, so we'll be looking at becoming the life science.
Technology developers and anchor here in, in South Jersey. So we're going to be starting with locations in Camden, in our joint health science building. In partnership with Cooper, we'll be working on our west campus with a new building that's going up. Can't wait for it to open later this year. We'll be adding Virtua Health as our anchor partner in that facility.
And we're also in Trenton. In the maternal and fetal health building that's going up, we'll be running a technology incubator in life sciences devoted towards maternal and fetal health technologies in the city of Trenton, which is fantastic for us. We just signed an amazing partnership with that Nadal's leaving down at the FAA.
We'll become the anchor partner to build out the research consortium, and that is, I think huge for New Jersey. Huge for the FA, a huge for Rowan. I've been watching this project probably 15 years at three different institutions trying to do research, trying to. Find that anchor that's finally going to lead it.
And I think with the Dolls leadership and some of the work we're doing, Dr. Mond we're that anchor partner. So suddenly at Rowan, you look at our incubators, our innovation centers, we are in. The shore in Pomona and bordering Atlantic City. We're now up in Trenton. We've got anchors in Camden, as well as our west campus.
So we've created this whole ecosystem in South Jersey where you go, here, you go here. Rowan is driving innovation. Rowan is driving education and to me. That innovation, that growth in the areas of health sciences, ai, machine learning, this is, we are going to transform South Jersey in our region.
So that's very exciting.
Jim Barrood: That's a great overview. Nidhal, let's talk about some of those programs Tony mentioned, but other things that you're working on.
Nidhal Bouaynaya: So leading AI at a higher ed in higher education or at. Right nowadays is fun but challenging. So a couple of things I'm working on focusing on is one is building the infrastructure right to do ai and the second is revamping.
Our educational curriculum, especially in non-stem right area, to integrate AI across disciplines, integrate AI in the arts, integrate AI in humanities in business, in healthcare I think we can all see from, we see the news today, right? AI is making music, is making films is creating scenarios and storytelling.
So how can we not leverage only these tools? How can we have our students understand AI at a level that they can use it creatively and responsibly? And here I'm talking about the art student, the humanities student. So it's not only about AI literacy, again, it's deeper than that. And prepare our student for the jobs not of tomorrow.
The jobs of today. AI designer, right? Ai compliance officer. These are jobs that are available today. These are six figure salary jobs. For students who are in department or colleges of arts, humanities, social sciences. So that is basically the, I want toa say the two faces, right? That, that I'm working on.
And on the other hand, of course, we would like to lead and innovate in ai, and that is creating the infrastructure needed to do impactful research in ai.
Jim Barrood: Fantastic. What about the virtual reality and Dreamscape, who wants to talk about that?
Tony Lowman: I would love to start. This is just an incredible passion project.
I think for me as well as Nadal and I, I. I love it because we get to talk. So I'll I'll walk back to the fall of 2019. When I first became Provost Nadal and a team were working on a wonderful project using our existing VR tools to build a class. And it was a class at the intersection of humanities, the engineers, the social scientists.
I remember going and meeting the students. You had engineers, you had historians, you had education majors, you had computer science, you had artists. It was just fantastic. It was amazing to watch. Except from the seat of a provost. It cost us about $250,000 to develop and run the course.
And it was probably going to cost us maybe about half that every time we wanted to run it. For 20 students. So clearly not at scale. And then, we talk about how do we get better? How do we, do this? And I think it was in 21 or 22 we saw the launch of dreamscape learn the partnership with Arizona State and Dreamworks Entertainment.
We've going to see that. So in the fall, the spring of 23, we took a visit, a leadership visit out there. We saw it with our own eyes and said, wow, this is, they cracked the code. They figured out how to scale this. They figured out how to, make this an upfront investment. And then you run it, develop it, do it.
I saw the ability of us to. Adopt the technology, adopt the courses they had, and then turn it over to folks like Nadal. And we were going to go nuts and have a good time with this. So we installed it within six months. We went live with courses last year. It is, I think the future of education, the future of educating students, the future of technology.
It's only going to grow. It's. It's going to be fantastic. We cut the ribbon on our lab last year, or on our facility last spring. And some of the dreamscape learned leaders came in and said, wow, you guys, it's exciting to put this into the hands of a university that was already doing this before you got our technology and are taking our technology to, to new areas.
Jim Barrood: That's amazing. Talk to us about people don't realize how much Rowan has grown. Give us an overview on how big Rowan is these days.
Tony Lowman: So we are sitting right now where we're getting our final count. We're, if you count all of our campuses our medical schools, our online programs, we are just hovering over 25,000 students over the course of a year.
And we're at a point right now where we just enrolled again, our largest class ever. We have filled every dorm bed on campus. And we're, this represents about a little more than doubling our growth over the last 10 years. Yeah, we're about, we're being very strategic in our growth, right?
Too is we can't just put it all here on Glassboro. We have about 14,000 students here on this Glassboro campus. And going back even 2019 when we hit our high, that's our high that's about our capacity here. We don't really want to grow beyond that. Where we're growing is on our medical school campuses.
Where we're growing is on the new veterinary school campus, and we're really growing our online. Population to meet learners where they are. And, all these things together is what kept us in a pretty good, financially stable position that allows us to be opportunistic, to do things like dreamscape open a vet school invest in a new physician assistant program, a new buildings here and there.
So we've. We've been very good with strategic growth and really not overwhelming any one specific campus. And where we're right now, we look we went from 2013 having, three campuses to now we have 10 campus locations, including our community college partners where we offer degrees.
Jim Barrood: That's really amazing. And before we get to your, each of your entrepreneurial ventures, talk to us or just highlight the entrepreneurial program at Rowan. I know it's come a long way and a lot of respect for them. As someone who ran an entrepreneurship center for many years, tell, talk to us about that in the know real quick.
Nidhal Bouaynaya: So entrepreneurship, at Rowan, I'm going to give the broad picture, right? It's at all levels, right? So we have the entrepreneurship school. Tony can talk more right about the which is within the school of business. I am the faculty lead of the NSFI core that stands for Innovation Core of the Northeast i Core Hub.
It's a $50 million. Grant from the National Science Foundation to initially eight. Now we are about 10 institutions. Rowan was a core from the submission of the grant institution led by Princeton, and that's where we train students and and faculty. To take their innovations from the lab to the marketplace.
So Rowan, we have our own team. We do these trainings not only for our students and faculty, but also for the community around us. So we are, we are very entrepreneurial, actually, university e even I, I know colleagues at other institutions and I can say that I think I'm lucky to be at Rowan in such an entrepreneurial place, right from our perspective.
But Tony can talk about the entrepreneurship school within the college of business.
Tony Lowman: Entrepreneurship at Rowan is something I think we've worked very hard to make part of our culture. So it, it really flows through the academic programs and offerings that we have our School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Which. It's part of offering degrees, it's part of co-curricular educational opportunities.
For example, they just finished the faculty cohort in the entrepreneurship training certificate that did a course over the summer. We had our student companies do a summer bootcamp on, on entrepreneurship, but we also carry that outside of the classroom. And we've really tried to tie the school.
Across the curriculum to our tech commercialization office and our faculty, to our Rowan Innovation Venture Fund. Which we launched with $25 million to invest in, in Rowan based technologies. And that really has grown enough legs that we just spun that Rowan Innovation Fund out into Garden State Ventures, which is now a freestanding Rowan backed venture fund that we hope to be, going live with, anywhere between 50 and a hundred million dollars.
Capital investments rolling out in the next year. So to me, innovation and entrepreneurship is part of the culture and DNA we've built here. And it's whether you're starting a company, whether you're in, whether you're entrepreneurial and using dreamscape to develop new modes of teaching. That's really what we want everybody here on the campus to be thinking like
Jim Barrood: that really is a fantastic development.
Especially that new fund. Really exciting. We usually before I get to that what about forecast? Let's, I'm sorry. Let's talk about your entrepreneurial ventures, right? Each of you are special because your entrepreneur is in your own right, which is not very typical as you know of most faculty.
Nina, let's start with you. Talk to us about your venture and or ventures. And then we'll pass it over to Tony.
Nidhal Bouaynaya: Sure. First I want to say that it's really academia that led me to this entrepreneurship venture, right? Yeah, so I knew for years now this doctor, we took classes together actually in Illinois.
I was doing in parallel and masters in mathematics as a PhD in ECE. And he was a doctor, a neuro-oncologist at rush Hospitals, but also doing a PhD in math. And so we were we used to meet, to work on, algebra topology class and homework. That's about, that includes not theory and that, that fun stuff.
And then we kept in touch. And when I went as a faculty member in Arkansas, we wrote a number of grants and he moved since then to the University of Alabama at Birmingham. And then one day he called me and he says he sees this need. So in his day job, basically what he does is he sees patients with brain tumors.
And these patients, basically, once a patient is diagnosed with these brain tumors you usually monitor the tumor. You don't right away try to radiate it or do chemotherapy. You try be because that could decrease the quality of life for the patient. So you want toa see, if the tumor is not growing, it's just there, you usually would like to leave the patient alone.
And growth monitoring is what he does for a living of the tumor. And then once the tumor grows, usually the treatment is to do radiation therapy. Now the entire radiation therapy process is automated, including the optimization of the dose of the radiology, the. Radiation, sorry, the angle, except for one piece that is not automated, which is delineating the tumor because obviously we would just like to burn the tumor and now if we under delineate or under segment, we're going to leave cancer cells.
Then the cancer is going to come back. If we over delineate then we're going to kill critical tissue. That could be related to critical cognitive function of the patient, right? So it's very important that we do this by, it's actually done by hand, by radiation oncologist. They sit down for hours. I've talked to hundreds of them right through the ICO program for hours and literally delineate frame by frame.
In an MRI where the tumor is and where the radiation should hit. Now that takes hours that is subjective. So in a sense that a patient that going to hospital A versus hospital B will get different parts of their brain. Burned. The literature actually shows that the variability can go up to 35% variability between doctors, between hospitals, so it's very subjective.
It's time consuming. Radiation oncologist would rather spend time with their patients, right? Rather than sit down and contour all day long. And that's where we saw the opportunity with ai, right? It was, so the company was founded is 2017 and I started doing actually work of whether AI can solve the problem.
And we know that AI machine learning is data driven. He works at the hospital, right at the cancer center actually with the new A and therefore he had plenty of data. And yeah, so we solved the problem. So now we went from hours to of seconds. The AI will give us the contouring in seconds, but after that we had to build the entire software because we need to have a human in the loop.
The doctor needs to check the results. We did this study with NIH, so basically we got N-I-H-S-B-I-R, phases one and two. That's 2 million and a half that we got from NIH and one of the requests that NIH asked us is to do a study with a hundred users, a hundred doctors, and the variability dropped to 8%.
And I'll tell you a little bit why. And then the timing went from hours to two minutes. The median time to finish two minutes because now the doctor goes frame by frame. And then okay. And then they need to sign off. Now. We believe that the variability decreased because of having this common AI contouring between the different doctors.
So they have an initial version zero that they could slightly tweak. So that dropped the variability. That
Jim Barrood: is amazing. And so where is it? Where's the venture now? Are you raising money or.
Nidhal Bouaynaya: So we've got FDA clearance last September. We are now functional in Cleveland Clinic and in Saudi Arabia.
Fantastic. Oh yes. Oh my God. And we're raising money.
Jim Barrood: What's the company called?
Nidhal Bouaynaya: MRI, math. because we started with MRIs and we started with both mathematician nurses. And we did not do AI in the beginning, by the way. We were doing some statistical and mathematical techniques to delineate the tumor.
So one thing I want to say is why is that process, by the way, so difficult? Why? It's the only process that's not automated, and that's because tumors is unpredictable. It can be anywhere, any size, any form. We really don't. It was very I worked on mathematical modeling actually, and it was very hard to come up with a model, right?
That can capture all forms, all sizes or locations connected, disconnected, multiple parts of the tumor. It's hard. And whereas AI actually learns from the data, I don't need to do
Jim Barrood: Amazing.
Nidhal Bouaynaya: I don't need to do any mathematical model anywhere anymore. I just need to give the data to ai.
So that, that's, I love that. But they also hate it. But
Jim Barrood: that's great. All right. Tony, what about you?
Tony Lowman: Yeah, mine. Mine's probably going to sound a lot less interesting. We fix your back, we take away your back pain and help you people get live more active pain-free lives. I'm a biomaterial scientist.
We, we, we developed a polymeric gel. That could this goes back more than 20 years to re replace the damage intervertebral disc. The core, the nucleus of your intervertebral disc. Developed it, started probably in 2000 with the first NSF grant. Got some venture funding, started a company.
And almost immediately this company was acquired by a major orthopedic device company I say acquired by today's standards. It was really a glorified licensing deal, but it got me experience in that space, and it went into clinical trials very quickly, I think 2007, first generation. And there were some challenges, surgical issues.
My lab was getting funded and we had generation two working on the shelf. I learned a lot about business. Spine wasn't hot, the market was drying up acquisitions, and in the company's mind, the project died. But I had, I said, but wait, I have generation two, I have generation three coming along board.
And they said, we don't really care. We don't want toa do this anymore. Life happened. I moved universities twice. But I always had in my mind, if they had just tried the generation two where I knew exactly their problems were this would be successful. And I think two years past 2015, I'd been a dean a couple of years and one of my partners in Europe said, Tony, whatever happened to those patents as those new patents?
You, you had this, it's heating up. So we put together a little company at our tech park. I had owned some of the IP and eight years later, or no? Wow. Shoot 10 years later. We have a venture backed company with about a dozen employees based on our West campus in Baltimore. I get to participate maybe once every other week.
I go in and see what's going on with the lab. But we do an injection lower lumbar spine. We've now treated 75 patients outside the us. All the patients are minimum two years out. Some are five years out with fantastic results, 80% reduction in pain. 85% recovery of function Patients are improved using less opioids.
They're. Less reliant on other non-surgical techniques. We're CE marked. We're looking at commercializing in Europe and we are actively enrolling and treating patients in our FDA pivotal study, so
Jim Barrood: that's amazing. What's the name of the
Tony Lowman: company? Name of the company's Regel Tech. We are like, did all, we're always raising money.
But something I'm really excited about is, as. As I'm doing this, as I'm the dean, as I'm trying to drive other innovators like Nadal. In the college when I'm Dean our Rowan Venture Fund said, Tony, why don't you come to us? Let us invest. So they were our first investor.
And then from there we've raised a lot of money. We're, treating patients. We're at the point now on the polymer side, we're starting to get to do a lot of good science, which means there's some PhD students involved. Which gets me involved more again while we wait for the clinical results, but that's amazing.
It's very exciting. It fits what I talked about in culture because some of the employees were former students at Rowan who this was their clinic project. Some of them to be a PhD students going on at Rowan. Rowan, has a nice equity position in the company so that. If we have a big exit, Rowan does well, the fund does well.
So it's that whole story. So
Jim Barrood: that's great. What a great success story. This has been a great conversation, folks. We usually have a just one thing section. So why don't you share just one tip for entrepreneurs or innovators looking to collaborate with Rowan Neal.
Nidhal Bouaynaya: Come and work with us. We're very open, we're very innovative, and we are agile.
Jim Barrood: Okay,
Tony Lowman: Tony, be prepared to move quickly because we like to take good ideas and put them into action quickly.
Jim Barrood: Great. And now we're onto our lightning round. If you weren't in academia, let's start with you, Tony. What would you be doing?
Tony Lowman: Oh my goodness. I thought I would have an answer for this. If I were not in academia, I would probably I would probably want toa be a serial entrepreneur. I.
Jim Barrood: What's one myth about academia? You've you'd love to bust
Tony Lowman: that we're not agile except I, it's hard to say because there are so many myths about academia and there are some truths.
So I would say the myth that we can't be agile. There you go. That we can't be agile. Okay. Some of us aren't, but we can be agile.
Jim Barrood: If you could re redesign higher ed. From scratch. What's one thing you would do differently?
Tony Lowman: I think we would have an we would have a less rigid schedule and plan. It wouldn't be two semesters, take the summer off and everybody goes four years for a bachelor's degree.
Jim Barrood: Got it. Okay. And if you had an unlimited innovation grant. No restrictions, what would you do with it? What would you study?
Tony Lowman: I think based on where I am and what we do with the research, I would study pain and how to take pain away from people safely.
Jim Barrood: Got it. Great. Okay. Neal, say now over to you.
If you weren't in academia, what would you be doing?
Nidhal Bouaynaya: I think I probably would have first started working in industry, figured that I'm not challenged enough and got my own adventure.
Jim Barrood: Got it. Okay. One myth about academia, you'd love to bust
Nidhal Bouaynaya: that faculty are resistant to change and cannot be entrepreneur.
We can be. We are entrepreneurs. We run our own labs, fund our own students, and raise our own funding.
Jim Barrood: Got it. Okay. And if you could redesign higher ed from scratch, what's one thing you would do differently?
Nidhal Bouaynaya: I have an autistic kid, so more personalized education.
Jim Barrood: Great. And if you had an unlimited innovation grant, no restrictions, what would you do?
Nidhal Bouaynaya: Gather the brightest mathematicians and mind to, get the next generation of ai. I like to work on conscious ai, the issue of consciousness and yeah, reasoning in ai.
Jim Barrood: I love that. All right. We usually conclude with a poem or a saying or a quote, me that. Why don't we start with you?
Nidhal Bouaynaya: Imagination is more important.
The knowledge is limited. Imagination basically in circles the world, that would be my code.
Jim Barrood: I like that.
Tony Lowman: Tony, what about you? It's perfect. It might seem like a shameless plug, but it's not because I feel like I'm at the right university. I'm going to take a quote from the ultimate entrepreneur, before entrepreneur was cool or even a thing, and that's a quote from Henry Rowan that we had put up on, on the glass walls when we built the new engineering building.
And my favorite is I've never been content with the status quo to my mind, satisfaction has always been the enemy of progress.
Jim Barrood: Great way to end. Thank you Nidhal. Thank you, Tony, so much. It's been a great conversation.
