Grose taking on new role
NY CREATES president to retire, take board chairman job Sammakia is vacating
Doug Grose, the longtime IBM executive and former CEO of Globalfoundries who took over the leadership role at Albany Nanotech through its nonprofit entity NY CREATES, is retiring Wednesday, three years after he was brought in to transform an organization once staggered by the arrest of its ex-leader, Alain Kaloyeros.
Grose, however, will assume the role of chairman of the board of NY CREATES, the umbrella nonprofit that manages Albany Nanotech and its research and economic development programs throughout the state.
“While the decision to retire is a difficult one, I am proud of the work we’ve done to grow our organization and look forward to remaining involved during this exciting time for our industry,” Grose said. “During the past three years, NY CREATES has worked closely with our partners to successfully innovate and accelerate technologies and generate economic opportunities in New York, reaching a number of milestones, strengthening our (research and development) partnerships, and facilitating multiple economic development initiatives across the state.”
The current chair of the NY CREATES board, Bahgat Sammakia, anoth
er former IBM employee who is a leading scientist at Binghamton University, is leaving the board after serving as the interim president of SUNY Polytechnic Institute.
Sammakia took the helm of SUNY Poly after the ouster of Alain Kaloyeros, the founder of SUNY Poly and Albany Nanotech who left abruptly in 2016 after being charged in a federal bidrigging scandal. Kaloyeros has since been sentenced to more than three years in federal prison but remains free pending his appeal.
“I’m grateful to have worked with an array of smart and innovative people around New York State during my time with NY CREATES,” Sammakia said in a statement. “I remain committed to advancing research that has a transformational impact on society, and I look forward to supporting meaningful (research and development) initiatives in my capacity as vice president for research at Binghamton University.”
The NY CREATES board will hold a job search to replace Grose as president of NY CREATES, although the process has not officially started.
NY CREATES was created in 2018 by the state to replace two former nonprofit entities that had owned Albany Nanotech’s real estate in Albany and across upstate. The new entity was also designed to elevate Albany Nanotech’s mission to include supporting tech development across the SUNY system beyond just SUNY Poly, which is technically just a tenant with other semiconductor companies on the Albany Nanotech campus complex.
Grose came aboard as president of NY CREATES at a time when Empire State Development, the state’s economic development agency had worked for two years to reorganize and re-energize Albany Nanotech and make its governance more transparent in the wake of the Kaloyeros scandal.
NY CREATES and state officials still bristle at the mention of Kaloyeros and the scandal that also ensnared one of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s most loyal aides, Joe Percoco and several big donors to Cuomo’s campaign. Yet in reality, Albany Nanotech has moved on from the Kaloyeros days and may be in store for its most important research and economic role yet.
Grose leaves the day-to-day management of Albany Nanotech to others at a time of great optimism and hope as Congress seeks to approve more than $50 billion in subsidies for computer chip manufacturing and research that could lead to Globalfoundries and other chip companies building new computer chip factories in upstate New York.
It could also lead to a new federally funded national computer chip research lab being located at Albany Nanotech, solidifying Albany and the Capital Region as an epicenter of chip innovation and manufacturing, a role once played by Austin, Texas and Silicon Valley.
While leading NY CREATES, Grose solidified IBM’S central research role at Albany Nanotech, a relationship that began when Kaloyeros was just starting what would later become the most advanced public-resource chip manufacturing research center in the world.
IBM is expected to take a lead role along with New York state in trying to land the federal chip lab, being called the National Semiconductor Technology Center.
“On behalf of IBM, we thank Dr. Grose for his transformational leadership as president of NY CREATES, and congratulate him on becoming the next chair of the board of directors,” Mukesh Khare, vice president of hybrid cloud for IBM Research said in a statement. “During his tenure, IBM and NY CREATES launched a multi-billion dollar AI hardware center (at Albany Nanotech) which has become a hub for innovation in the U.S. and around the world. We look forward to continuing our partnership with him and NY CREATES to grow and accelerate the semiconductor ecosystem in Albany.”