Seqwana Pryor is a chemical engineer with 18 years of corporate experience at DuPont Company, so she understands how much time it can take to develop a product. With the company she founded and runs in St. Louis, PryCor Technologies, she is trying to apply that understanding to developing a process: how to bring more African Americans into the region’s burgeoning tech start-up sector.
“I was talking to a DuPont executive, who is also African-American, and we were talking about how we’re so tired of hearing, ‘We can’t find a highly qualified diverse workforce,’” Pryor said.
“So I said: ‘Let’s create the workforce we are looking for 10 years from now.” If we don’t have it, let’s create it. That’s what we do when we create products, and we understand it’s a long-term thing. In pharmaceuticals, a product might be in development for 10 years.”
PryCor Technologies did a pilot project with Upward Bound students at the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville East St. Louis Center this July. As a hook, Pryor used food. In a five-week program, students learned to make ice cream and toured a DuPont facility to learn about food processing and food innovation.
“People don’t think about all of the science, physics and math that go into food,” Pryor said. “But the food was what made it exciting.”
The student response was encouraging. “I loved the food science class,” said one of the Upward Bound students, Lonnie Roberson. “It was fun, and gave me a lot of information on what is put into the food we eat.”
Jesse Dixon, executive director of SIUE East St. Louis, said that processed foods, of all things, could assist in the process of diversifying the science sector.
“When our students learned about, touched and tasted the soy protein that is manufactured by DuPont and is an ingredient in the everyday meat products we eat – from Slim Jims to frozen beef patties – that got them really interested in exploring food engineering and science careers,” Dixon said.
Pryor said her company has been invited to develop a year of programming for the center.
Pryor also is looking to engage minority students at a more mature stage in their development. PryCor Technologies is incubating in the supportive, collaborative environment of CIC@CET, a partnership between St. Louis’ Cortex Innovative Community (CIC) and the Center for Emerging Technologies (CET), based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She sees an opportunity to build a bridge between the region’s innovation hub and an historically black university less than two miles away.
“I am working on building a collaboration with Harris-Stowe State University,” Pryor said. “We know of no other HBCU that has partnered with a start-up to work in an innovation district and do research.”
Pryor is well-positioned to be that bridge. A native of Pensacola, Florida, she did her undergraduate work at an HBCU, Talladega College in Alabama, before becoming the first African-American woman to obtain a doctoral degree in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University. Having been a science student at an HBCU, she understands the challenges – and how to make opportunities out of them.
“At Talladega College, I learned what it means to be a young scientist who didn’t have the opportunity to do research because I was at a small college,” she said. But she sought out opportunities to do summer research at prestigious mainstream institutions, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Fortune 500 tech firms, such as IBM.
“You don’t have to have the resources,” Pryor said. “You just have to have someone else who has the resources. You just need access.”
That also describes her company’s incubation at CIC@CET, located at 20 S. Sarah St. in Midtown, just across Forest Park Parkway from Cortex proper. PryCor is one of some 150 companies in residence at CIC@CET, but not one of the 50-some startups with their own dedicated office space at the center. Pryor described the space as a “collaboratory,” where start-ups share space and support staff, yet can book private meeting rooms when needed.
Since she stepped into the tech start-up space (also called, with metaphorical grandiosity, an “ecosystem”) in January, she came to realize how many people who look like her have no idea this is happening in St. Louis. “I know many highly educated blacks – corporate people, lawyers – who don’t know this is here,” she said. She sees this as an additional opportunity to draft mature talent from other sectors in St. Louis to diversify the tech start-up scene.
Pryor was enticed into this sector by another African-American woman, Cheryl Watkins-Moore, director of Bioscience & Entrepreneurial Inclusion for BioSTL, which focuses on entrepreneurial application and commercialization of bioscience research. Watkins-Moore convinced her to take the start-up plunge after DuPont, which moved Pryor here in 2013, tried to relocate her again this January.
“Cheryl really inspired me with the notion that the same things I do for one company, I can do for many companies,” Pryor said. “She inspired me to enter the entrepreneurial space.”
Pryor’s core competency – which also is her company’s main business line – is using data to help a company streamline and improve its processes and products. The industry name for this is “Six Sigma,” which she described as “a data-driven approach to eliminate defects in any process. It can be applied to manufacturing, transactional businesses like banks, keeping medical records, really any product or service.”
Her husband, Travis Pryor, co-founded the company, though does not work for it. PryCor has four employees, whom Seqwana Pryor described as consultants. PryCor is a certified Minority and Women’s Business Enterprise.
Pryor said that Watkins-Moore, BioSTL and its annual VISION symposium have been critical to her company moving so far in such a short span of time.
“As a minority- and women-owned business in the biotech space, as well as only living in the area for three years, it can be challenging to make the right business connections,” Pryor said. “Through networking and programming events such as VISION, this allows entrepreneurs like myself to bring diversity and innovation into the St. Louis tech and biosciences community.”
The next such BioSTL symposium, VISION 2016, will be held 4-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, September 21 at St. Louis Community College – Forest Park. For more information, visit http://www.visionstlouis.com/.
For more information on PryCor Technologies, email contact@prycortech.com or call 302-528-0965.
VISION 2016, hosted by BioSTL, is a regional symposium aimed at building an inclusive, diverse innovation community. “We welcome anyone seeking to learn more about opportunities in bioscience, IT and advanced manufacturing,” organizer said. VISION 2016 will be held 4-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, September 21 at St. Louis Community College Forest Park s. For more information, visit http://www.visionstlouis.com/.
