Dennis Paustenbach Commits $1M for Professorship at Roux

PORTLAND, Maine—Less than 24 hrs soon after Dennis Paustenbach satisfied his new neighbor David Roux in Woodside, California, he was casting a fly rod for the very first time.

Roux and Paustenbach talked about fly-fishing at the introductory evening meal about 30 several years in the past, and Paustenbach claimed the only fishing he understood was as a kid in rural Ohio tossing a line with a worm on a hook in an endeavor to catch modest bass.

So Roux, an avid fly fisherman, questioned him if he would like to discover how to forged. If you’re fascinated, Roux explained to Paustenbach, satisfy at 8 a.m. at the soccer area. Seemingly, Paustenbach was intrigued.

“Dave explained, ‘You have a Ph.D. but you don’t know how to fly fish?’ I stated I experienced no clue,” Paustenbach says. “So he suggests, ‘I’m heading to train you how to forged.’ And which is what he did. So I achieved him there and he taught me how to cast.”

About two months later, the two flew throughout the state to go fly-fishing for brook trout in northwestern Maine around the Canadian border. The fly-fishing beginner and Roux went to Big Island Camps and his appreciate of fly-fishing was born in a rowboat on the pond.

“We grew to know a single yet another very very well on that fishing excursion and, considering the fact that then, we have fished in a variety of locations close to the entire world. Fly-fishing was a genuinely exclusive gift that he gave me,” Paustenbach says of his longtime buddy.

Paustenbach was dedicated and intuitive, and promptly proved to be adept, Roux states. Fly-fishing is a bit of a gearhead sport, he says, and “Dennis is sort of the greatest gearhead.” Having said that, outside of the technological execution, Roux suggests, fly-fishing is an justification to dangle out with buddies.

“Casting in and of alone is not that significantly fun, but the fishing section, staying out on the water, getting with mates, catching fish, which is a blast,” Roux suggests. “I believe it is not so considerably about the fishing as the people today you fish with and the put exactly where fish reside, you know, beautiful, normal venues.”

Over the many years the friends—both successful businessmen—have absent fly-fishing countless situations and normally talked about the Maine financial system and how the location would be bolstered by a graduate university centered on innovative computing and entrepreneurship.

In January of 2020, Northeastern partnered with Dave and Barbara Roux to launch a graduate training and analysis campus in Portland, Maine: The Roux Institute at Northeastern University, built to teach generations of expertise for the digital and daily life sciences sectors, and push sustained financial progress in Portland, the state of Maine and northern New England.

“[The Roux Institute at Northeastern] was the most effective matter to take place to Maine considering the fact that the constructing of schooners,” states Paustenbach, a scientist, entrepreneur and philanthropist.

Very pleased of the Roux Institute and what it represents to the region, Paustenbach has fully commited to funding a checking out professorship at Northeastern’s Roux Institute. Paustenbach has designed a $1 million prepared present that would be funded through his estate.

Paustenbach mentioned the Roux Institute is revitalizing the regional economic system and its “graduates should really fully improve the upcoming of Maine.”

“The effect of the Roux Institute on Portland and all of New England will be amazing. And it won’t just take lengthy,” suggests Paustenbach, a toxicologist and industrial hygienist who founded ChemRisk, a human and ecological possibility evaluation firm that grew to become one particular of the major this sort of consulting firms in the U.S.

“Because it is not reasonable to check with a handful of visionaries, like the Rouxs, to fund what ought to be a neighborhood issue-fixing hard work, many others of us with lesser sources require to do our component. This donation is just intended to aid in a quite modest way to accelerate what they have begun,” Paustenbach says. “Having a number of browsing professorships will allow very proficient college to occur to the Roux to see, firsthand, what is occurring and no matter if they want to be portion of its potential.”

Maine has welcomed the Roux Institute, Paustenbach suggests, and students are embracing the mission. By the Roux Institute the location will be associated with AI, information sciences, digital engineering, highly developed computational equipment, and genomic medicine that will be the “economic engine of the 21^st century.”

Paustenbach states Northeastern’s experiential discovering design is effective well with David and Barbara Roux’s desire to address the financial challenges in Maine at the Roux Institute from a functional business solution.

“When you assemble this a lot talent with these types of pupils and when the faculty want to make a change, all housed in an energetic and dynamic natural environment, only great issues transpire. This is the foundation for creativeness and for lights the fires which build the entrepreneurial spirit,” Paustenbach states.

“What the Roux Institute has shown is that folks with eyesight and money methods, and a desire to help the typical man, can make a sea improve that will strengthen the lives of extra than 1 million folks, who, just 5 yrs ago, did not have a authentic opportunity to break out of the vicious circle.”

Paustenbach appreciates the value of seizing possibility. Born in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, outside the house Pittsburgh and lifted in the rural Akron, Ohio, area, then afterwards in Strasburg, Ohio, which adjoins Amish communities, Paustenbach went on to make various degrees, like a Ph.D., right before founding ChemRisk. He attended a high faculty aimed at educating “farmers to turn into farmers,” where by only six students in the graduating class of 50 applied to four-yr faculties.

Just after earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Know-how in Terre Haute, Indiana, Paustenbach went to operate as a approach chemical engineer at Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical firm in Indianapolis. There, he was instrumental in building its industrial hygiene and occupational health and fitness engineering packages throughout the early yrs of the occupational and environmental health and fitness movement, shortly soon after the federal govt began the Occupational Protection and Wellness Administration.

Paustenbach then gained a master’s degree in industrial hygiene and toxicology from the College of Michigan and returned to Eli Lilly. He was lecturing at Purdue College and was available a chance to be a part of the faculty and make a Ph.D. in environmental toxicology, which he completed in 1982. Right after a stint as manager of industrial toxicology at Stauffer Chemical in Connecticut, Paustenbach was lured to Silicon Valley. He grew to become the supervisor of industrial toxicology at Syntex Prescribed drugs in Palo Alto, California, which is acknowledged for building the delivery manage pill.

Occupational health and environmental remediation rose to the highlight in the 1980s, and Paustenbach was on the vanguard of threat assessment. He had gained experience on how chemical compounds were regulated and authored numerous content articles on the subject matter.

In 1985, Paustenbach started out the consulting business ChemRisk. He entered a joint venture with McLaren/Hart Engineering in Sacramento where he turned ChemRisk into a nationally acknowledged consulting firm in industrial cleanliness and toxicology.

“I was like the a person-eyed guy in the land of the blind,” Paustenbach states humbly. “I took place to know something no one else did. And 1 factor led to an additional, but it was good to be on the forefront.”

ChemRisk had various offices across the state, such as one in the Stroudwater Crossing setting up in Portland, as properly as Australia.

He joined Exponent in 1995 and then re-proven ChemRisk as an impartial agency in 2004. He sold the business to Cardno, an Australian corporation, in 2013 and remained as president right until 2019, when he left and begun Paustenbach and Associates, in Jackson, Wyoming, which employs 17 men and women.

In addition to fly-fishing, Paustenbach enjoys golfing and downhill snowboarding. He also has a enthusiasm for American antique home furniture and folk artwork. He wrote a sequence of papers and a ebook about pie secure, or pie chest, a cupboard utilised to keep pies and food stuff prior to ice bins that was an significant piece of American furniture in the 18th and 19th century. 

Even though his principal home and business enterprise business is in Wyoming, Paustenbach is active in Maine. All through his lots of holidays in Maine about the many years Paustenbach sometimes attended the Sunday services of a Shaker neighborhood in Gray, Maine. Paustenbach states this was the final active Shaker group in The us, down from about 14 communities in 1840.  He was the nationwide campaign chairman for increasing dollars for the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake in Grey, Maine. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor.

Paustenbach, who owns a house in Cape Elizabeth, Maine—and has owned other people in the Portland spot over the very last 30 years—says he and his spouse and children like Maine, the ocean and the vivid sunshine. The area has intended so considerably to him, he suggests, he is pleased to be equipped to fund the visiting professorship at Northeastern’s Roux Institute.

“Maine is magical. It swiftly held a distinctive spot for me. The ocean was specific. The shiny winter times are a spectacular change from the cloudy skies of the Midwest. It is phenomenal. The sky’s so good. There’s a blue sky and it is invigorating,” he states.

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