HADDEN TO SPEARHEAD SOUTHERN MISS' VENTURE
IN HEALTH CARE ENHANCEMENT FOR GULFPORT
By Angela Cutrer

HATTIESBURG - After accepting Congressman Gene Taylor's Veterans' Day challenge to "give back" to the veterans needing health care service on the Coast, The University of Southern Mississippi has brought on the expertise of Dr. Richard Hadden to help direct its efforts to strengthen health care service and opportunities for veterans and residents of the Gulf Coast.

As director of strategic venture development, Hadden will develop strategic plans and relationships for university development and business ventures. He will work under the management of Dr. Angeline Dvorak, vice president of research and economic development at Southern Miss.

"Dr. Hadden is an extraordinary individual," Dr. Dvorak said. "He has a unique skill set, both as a medical doctor and a true scientist, as well as an entrepreneur and visionary. I've had the opportunity to work with him on other projects, and he's very professional and very bright. We are fortunate to attract him to work on our team."

Southern Miss' president, Dr. Shelby Thames, said "We are excited to bring Dr. Hadden on board to spearhead our efforts to create better health care opportunities on our Gulf Coast. He is exactly the person we need to get this job done the right way. He has numerous contacts throughout the health care community in South Mississippi, which will really work to the advantage of our efforts."

Hadden, raised in Bay St. Louis, has skills crossing several disciplines. Most recently he was with the University of Mississippi as a senior research scientist building a biomedical research program. He is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, the University of Mississippi Medical School and the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine in San Antonio. Prior to his research position, he engaged in several startups in the United States and Europe, medical practice, and experimental physics. A private pilot since 1971, he attended flight surgeon school in San Antonio with the U.S. Air Force and deployed with U-2 and SR-71 squadrons.

He is a past vice president of AetherWorks Corp. of Minneapolis, a startup voice and data carrier class convergence solutions company that sold for $12 million in 1995, and was a co-founder and CEO of Linguistic Technologies Inc. of Minneapolis, a startup speech recognition company that sold for $11 million in December 1999. He has served as director of mergers and acquisitions with InTelNet Telecom in Paris, was co-founder and president of Flavin Limited, a daily hemodialysis device development company that has licensed its technology to a publicly traded European home health provider, and was a co-founder of Phylogene in Nimes, France, a genetic detection food testing company currently operating commercially.

Hadden also served as a state agency medical consultant for the state of Minnesota; as a medical doctor at the Boynton Health Service at the University of Minnesota; and spent three years practicing at Mississippi Family Practitioners in Greenville, Miss. Prior to medical school, he was a consulting scientific programmer-analyst for Computer Sciences Corporation at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, and was a research assistant in physics at Stanford University and in Geneva, Switzerland.

Hadden and his wife, Helene, have a 16-month-old son, Julien Michel. Hadden will keep an office in Hattiesburg while his wife, a pediatric pulmonary transplant specialist who also holds a doctorate in cell cycle research, completes the founding of a pediatric lung transplant program in Lyon, France.

Hadden looks forward to getting down to work. "It is a wonderful opportunity to pursue strategic development working with Dr. Thames, Dr. Dvorak, and the entire outstanding team at Southern Miss," he said.

Hadden said the Southern Miss project will involve many different entities working together to make things happen. "Development of a center to full potential will require everyone to make a long-term commitment to improved health care for veterans, better education for our students, better health care for residents, as well as economic development for all in the region," he said.

Dr. Dvorak agrees. "In terms of our university, (Dr. Hadden's) coming here to work on this project shows that people are fully embracing our role as a comprehensive research university," she said. "It does demonstrate that people are excited about this university, which proves that we are truly on the radar screen of the best and brightest ready to do almost anything possible" to advance the university's research possibilities in serving its stakeholders.

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