Rooted in place

Summer 2018 Edition
Alumni & Friends Magazine

JD Kittle, co-founder of Molecular Technologies Laboratories

Rooted in place

The first thing you see in JD Kittle’s office at 51��’s Innovation Center is a table. Not the usual kind with four legs, but a narrow board laid horizontally across a small ladder. Utilitarian and practical. Much like Kittle himself.

Cat Hofacker, BSJ ’18 | August 17, 2018

“I grew up in an environment where, day to day, people have to come up with solutions,” says Kittle, a native of Glouster, Ohio, where hard work and helping hands mitigate the lack of available basic resources. “When I get stuck, I look to see what I’ve got around me that I can use. It’s like with the table I made…I took the pieces I had and made something unique.”

Kittle, BS ’80, also uses the resources at hand to further Molecular Technologies Laboratories (MTL) which he co-found in 2012, and ProclaRx LLC, where he serves as CEO. Kittle and his partners apply biotechnology to create products from people’s ideas and improve their existing tech. And although the principles of biotechnology are complex, Kittle’s businesses are guided by the simplicities of fairness and good faith, rules he learned working in his father’s Glouster feed store.

“Biotech is like a small town. [You work] with the same clients for years, so you have to treat people fair,” Kittle says.

Kittle’s journey from small-town son to biotech innovator is rooted in place. After earning his undergraduate degree in chemistry at OHIO, he went on to receive his doctoral degree in chemistry at Harvard University and then consulted for biotech companies in Texas and California. Kittle always “pined for back home,” he said, “but there was no biotech here.”

Close-up of lab materials, and hands holding a pitri dish — Artifacts from Kittle’s Athens County childhood are on display in his office at OHIO’s Innovation Center, home to two biotech companies he leads. Photos by Ellee Achten, BSJ ’14, MA ’17

Kittle’s return to the region in 2011 to spend time with family coincided with a position at OHIO as assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a re-connection with former co-workers from his time at Battelle, a Columbus, Ohio-based science and tech company. Kittle was asked to join their new company, MTL, but was determined to find a way to also stay in Southeast Ohio. Thanks to the OHIO Innovation Center’s support, its lab space and equipment, and a strong regional workforce, Kittle stays rooted in the place he loves.

“It all comes back to finding the resources, and that includes the people around you,” Kittle says. “I’m not saying people from here are better than people from any place else, I’m just saying they’re my people. They accept me, understand me, I understand them. It just feels right.”

Feature Photograph by Ellee Achten, BSJ ’14, MA ’17