New post for MIT professor who resigned after Sherley case

Dr. Frank L. Douglas (left), who resigned from a leadership role at MIT after a colleague's controversial tenure fight, has been named head of a biomedical research center in Ohio.

Douglas, the founder and former director of MIT’s Center of Biomedical Innovation, is the new president and CEO of the BioInnovation Institute in Akron, the center said today. It was established in October by a hospital, three universities, and two health care systems to promote biomedical research and business development.

Douglas resigned from MIT in June 2007 as James Sherley was ending his fight for tenure. Sherley, an African-American stem cell scientist, had gone on a 12-day hunger strike earlier that year to protest what he called racism in MIT's denial of tenure. MIT has denied his contention.

Douglas, who is also African-American, said he left because of MIT's "lack of will to deal with a problem that had clearly polarized minority faculty and the larger MIT community."

Since leaving MIT, Douglas has been a senior fellow at the Ewing M. Kauffman Foundation, a senior partner at Puretech Ventures, and chief scientific adviser at Bayer Healthcare.

(Photo from the BioInnovation Institute in Akron)