Dr. Diosdado P. Banatao, the Bill Gates of the Philippines, a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and computer guru, and the Presidential consultant for the country’s Engineering Research and Development for Technology (ERDT), was the commencement speaker. He received an honoris causa in Doctor of Technology in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the computer industry. Dr. Macapado A. Muslim, the President of Mindanao State University System, conferred the degree.

Curriculum Vitae of DIOSDADO P. BANATAO
Doctor of Technology
Honoris Causa

PERSONAL DETAILS

Date of Birth: May 23, 1946
Place of Birth: Inuit, Cagayan Province
Civil Status: Married
Spouse: Maria Cariaga

Education

Dado holds a B.S.E.E., cum laude, from the Mapua Institute of Technology in the Philippines and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Tallwood Venture Capital Involvement

Dado Banatao is the managing partner of Tallwood Venture Capital, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley with $500M under management. With his past experiences as an entrepreneur, Dado provides Tallwood with a unique perspective in technology investments. Tallwood invests in unique and hard-to-do semiconductor technology solutions for computing, communication, and consumer platforms.

Professional Career

Prior to forming Tallwood, Dado was a venture partner at the Mayfield Fund. He co-founded three technology startups:S3 (SBLU), Chips & Technologies (INTC) and Mostron. He also held positions in engineering and general management at National Semiconductor, Seeq Technologies, Intersil and Commodore International. Dado pioneered the PC chip set and graphics acceleration architecture that continue to be two of the foundation technologies in every PC today. As an engineer, he is credited with developing several key semiconductor technologies and is regarded as a Silicon Valley visionary.

Honors and Awards

He was honored with the prestigious Master Entrepreneur of the Year Award sponsored by Ernst & Young, Inc. magazine and Merrill Lynch Business Financial Services. He has been on Forbes Midas List for at least four years running. Dado received the highly respected Ellis Island Medal of Honor, which is awarded to U.S. citizens who contribute significantly to an ethnic group or country. The Asian Business League of San Francisco bestowed its Distinguished Asian Leadership Award upon him for his leadership skills in the public, private and non-profit sectors of the community. For his tireless efforts in spreading the importance of preserving and promoting the Philippines, President Fidel V. Ramos presented Dado with the Pamana Ng Filipino Award. He was featured by ABC KGO Television in “Profiles of Excellence” honoring outstanding Bay Area Asian Pacific Americans. Also in recognition of his technological innovations and contributions, the University of the Philippines conferred upon him, Doctor of Science, honoris causa.

Memberships in Boards

Dado serves as Chairman of SiRF Technology (SIRF), InPhi Corporation, Peleton and Sequoia Communications and is on the boards of directors of Alphion Corporation, Redfern Integrated Optics, and T-RAM Semiconductor. He also served as Chairman, as well as led investments in Marvell Technology Group (MRVL); Acclaim Communications, acquired by Level One (INTC); Newport Communications, acquired by Broadcom (BRCM); Cyras Systems, acquired by Ciena (CIEN); and Stream Machine, acquired by Cirrus Logic (CRUS).

Family

Dado’s wife, Maria Banatao, earned a bachelor’s degree from St. Paul University in the Philippines and a master’s degree in Education from the University of Washington majoring in educational psychology. She previously designed and managed employment and training programs for the Foothill De Anza Community College District’s Occupational Training Institute before she turned her full attention to a favorite area for her and Dado, giving back to the community. She is currently a member of the University of California at Berkeley Foundation Board of Trustees, Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital Foundation Board and The Ayala Foundation USA.

Dado and Maria have three children. Rey received a B.S. in Biochemistry from UC Berkeley and completed his Ph.D. in bioinformatics at UC San Francisco. He and wife Gabby, a UC Irvine alumna, live with their children in Los Angeles where Rey completed his post-doctoral work at UCLA. Desi received a B.S. in Materials Science Engineering and an M.S. in Engineering from UC Berkeley. He and his wife, Jinah, a UC Davis alumna, live in San Francisco. Jinah is a VP and Senior Human Resources Specialist at Think Equity Partners, an investment banking firm in San Francisco. Rey and Desi are currently working on their first start-up company, Entropy Research LABS. Tala graduated from UC Berkeley with degrees in mass communications and political science. She graduated from San Francisco’s Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM) in fashion merchandising and at Los Angeles FIDM in international manufacturing and product development. She played college volleyball as a member of the UC Berkeley varsity volleyball team.

Philanthropy

Dado and Maria Banatao are deeply committed to education and express their dedication in many ways. Dado serves as Chairman of the College of Engineering Advisory Board and is a member of the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Executive Advisory Council. Maria is a Trustee for the University of California, Berkeley Foundation. Dado and Maria are generous supporters of UC Berkeley, especially the College of Engineering through their cornerstone gift to help launch the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). Both natives of the Philippines, Maria and Dado are passionate about giving back to the country. They funded a fellowship grant for computer science and engineering faculty from the University of the Philippines to collaborate on research programs with counterpart professors at UC Berkeley on the Berkeley Campus. Through the Asian Pacific Fund, they have provided scholarships to assist California high school students of Filipino heritage in pursuing a college education in science and engineering, a field which Filipinos are currently under-represented. Recently, the Dado and Maria Banatao Institute for High Impact Research which they funded was unveiled at the University of the Philippines College of Engineering campus in Diliman. Believing that advance research in engineering and technology is a means to economic and industrial development, Dado is involved in the country’s Engineering Research and Development as an important member of its Advisory Council. ERDT is a consortium of eight top engineering schools in the Philippines which include UP, Ateneo, DLSU, Mapua Institute of Technology, UP Los Banos, Central Luzon State University, San Carlos University, and MSU-IIT, the only member from Mindanao.

Through their personal vision and strong encouragement as well as their thoughtful guidance and generous philanthropy, Dado and wife Maria are enabling young people with talent to transform their lives and, quite literally, to make the world a better place.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

GMANews.TV

Ryan Balili in his laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh with his cryogenic experiments and set-up. He is a faculty member of the Department of Physics, MSU-IIT, currently pursuing his PhD in Physics at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

MANILA, Philippines — A Filipino scientist currently studying in the United States has found a new source of coherent light, like lasers, which only potentially needs lower power to operate, the
Department of Science and Technology (DOST) said on Wednesday.

In a press statement, the DOST’s Science Education Institute (DOST-SEI) said Ryan Balili, together with his adviser David Snoke of University of Pittsburgh, were able to demonstrate that the transition of particles into waves could be done at higher temperature which would require lesser power to generate.

The phenomenon is called Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC), named after Indian physicist Satyendranath Bose who worked on the statistics of monoatomic ideal gases and Albert Einstein who speculated this macroscopic coherent state “Einstein proposed that at very low temperatures a certain type of identical particles, now called bosons, would ’collapse,’ or condense, into a single quantum mechanical wave.

“However, in Balili’s work, he was able to demonstrate the same phenomenon at higher temperatures using polaritons, an energy particlewhich exists only in a medium that can be polarized by an electromagneticwave,” the statement explained.

It quoted Balili as saying that the main challenge was making the polariton transition into a BEC even if polaritons exist only for very short times, approximately a few picoseconds.

Nevertheless, Balili and his adviser were able to trap polaritons which turned into a single, spatially compact condensate of gas analogous to
atomic BEC.

“One way to think of a polariton BEC is that it is a state of matter that has some of the properties of a laser and some of the properties of a superconductor,” the DOST-SEI statement said.

Balili and his group at the University of Pittsburgh said that what they were able to show is that the emitted light of the polariton BEC and its electrons are coherent, which is a property of superconductors that allows it to make electric current flow without resistance and wavelike interference of electrical signals.

He said that the most promising applications of the polaritons BEC are in optical devises which takes advantage of laser-like sources at low-power coherent light sources.

“This may be useful for signaling, switching, and amplification in optical communications,” he said.

Balili, a 2002 summa cum laude Bachelor of Science in Physics graduate of the Mindanao State University - Iligan Institute of Technology, is currently taking up his doctorate in Physics at the University of
Pittsburgh where he also finished his Master of Science in Physics.

Balili was a scholar of the DOST during his undergraduate years.

Dr. Ester B. Ogena, director of the DOST-SEI, lauded Balili’s work saying his discovery is a manifestation of the caliber of scholars the DOST is getting every year.

“We are the germination box of soon-to-be great names in the science and technology world. Balili is just one of them and every year we get around 3,500 scholars who in the future would propel the Philippines
into first world status,” she said in the statement.

Ogena expressed optimism that more DOST-SEI scholars would make a mark in science and technology with the implementation of the Accelerated Science and Technology Human Resource Development Program (ASTHRDP) and the Engineering Research and Development for Technology Program (ERDTP) which provides students to proceed to the MS and PhD studies as a scholar.

“We are beefing up our critical mass of scientists and engineers through the ASTHRDP and ERDTP by providing them with scholarships in our top universities,” she said.

Ogena avowed to continuously entice students to venture into science careers through promotional programs and scholarship grants.

“We shall be at the forefront of science and technology human resources development and create the necessary critical mass of scientists and engineers the Philippines needs,” she said. -
GMANews.TV

Popularity: 7% [?]

by Carmie Carpio,Asianjournal .com, Exclusive Stories, July 14, 2007

MAKATI CITY — After years of tedious research, Filipino scientist Dr. Baldomero Olivera and his team at the University of Utah discovered a major breakthrough in pain management. Now, deadly pain might have finally met its match in Ziconotide (trade name Prialt).

The breakthrough research was presented by none other than Olivera himself to doctors, scientists, investors, students and the media gathered at the Filipinas Heritage Museum on July 6. His talk, Turning Killers into Pain Killers, was part of Innovation Forum, a series of bi-monthly forums on various technologies sponsored by the Ayala Foundation and InfoDev.

Seaside Discovery

This major discovery opens a new drug pipeline for pain and other serious diseases. Olivera is among the few scientists who have chosen to tap animal wildlife as a pharmacological source of treatment.

Olivera developed a keen interest in seashells as a young boy in the Philippines. He would gather and bring them home so he could compare them with the diagrams in the pages of his books on marine life.

One particular seashell, the cone snail, became the focus of Olivares and his team. Studying them had been like second nature to Olivares since cone snails are abundant in tropical countries like the Philippines. The team’s curiosity was particularly aroused by the duality of the seashell being exquisite on the outside but highly lethal on the inside. After further research, they found out that the cone snail’s venom which contains conotoxins has an equally antidotal effect. Conotoxins is now being considered to yield new drugs for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and other brain disorders aside from pain.

Moreover, Olivares’ interest in sea cone snails became instrumental in his discovery of a new pharmaceutical class called conopeptides, the active ingredient in Ziconotide. And in 1992, Olivera’s team was able to determine the analgesic-like qualities of conopeptide. From there, Ziconotide was made available to the public via Prialt.

Non-narcotic Pain Relief

Before Prialt, there was morphine, a highly potent opiate analgesic drug that effectively relieves severe pain. Morphine, however, is a narcotic - a controlled substance and therefore not readily accessible to those who need urgent relief from extreme pain.

Prialt, on the other hand, has none of the habit-forming qualities of morphine. Administered via a spinal pump, patients now have a safer pain-killing alternative. Prialt is believed to be more powerful than morphine. In recent years, Prialt has been the better choice for the treatment or management of pain caused by a variety of diseases such as AIDS, cancer, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s.

The US Food & Drug Administration approved Prialt for severe chronic pain in December 2004. Formerly known as Neurex, it was bought in 1998 by Ireland’s Elan Pharmaceuticals for $700 million. In 2005, sales reached $6.1 million, and then doubled in the succeeding year

Popularity: 100% [?]