Expansions
Certara, 100 Overlook Center, Suite 101, Princeton 08540. 888-708-7444. Edmundo Muniz, chief executive officer. www.certara.com.
Certara, a drug development consulting company, will partner with Centers for Disease Control to create OpenMDI (Open Medicolegal Death Investigation), a national system that will collect and share mortality data efficiently, allowing CDC to respond rapidly to critical public health priorities, such as tracking and understanding the toxicology behind drug overdoses from opioids
“Enabling the CDC to upgrade its historical analysis approach to one that leverages predictive analytics and ‘near real time’ data to address global health challenges is at the core of Certara’s mission,” said Certara’s CEO Dr. Edmundo Muniz. “We are privileged to be working alongside the CDC in creating a death surveillance system that aggregates disparate data in a secure and private structure facilitating decision-support analysis, visualization and reporting of toxicology and other key drug-induced death information to address the drug overdose crisis in this country.”
More than 47,450 Americans die from an opioid overdose every year (that includes prescription opioids and heroin), 1 according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). More than 70,200 Americans are estimated to have died from a drug overdose in 2017. The sharpest increase occurred among deaths related to fentanyl and similar synthetic opioids with nearly 30,000 overdose deaths.
Crosstown Moves
Wilshire Technologies, 243 Wall Street, Princeton 08540. 609-683-1117. Joe Philipps, founder. www.wilshiretechnologies.com.
The chemical technology company has moved from 318 to 243 Wall Street.
Deaths
Henry Horn, 77, on March 14. He was a biologist who founded and directed Princeton University’s program in environmental studies. He studied the growth of trees, the dispersal of seeds, and the social behavior of butterflies. A memorial service will be held Sunday, May 5, at 1:30 p.m. at the university chapel.
Leonard J. LaPlaca, 95, on March 10. For more than 60 years he was the co-owner of Nassau Interiors, a Nassau Street furniture store.
Frank L. Tamasi, 87, on March 10. A 60-year resident of Princeton, was a supervisor at the university and also worked at ETS.
Richard Wayne Stryeski, 72, on March 10. He worked at IBM (Lexmark) and later owned Totally Pets and Hobby in Hamilton.
Andrew B. Swanson, 61, on January 30. He worked for Highlands Insurance Co. in Ewing. A memorial service will be held at on Saturday, April 13, at 11 a.m. at Fellowship United Methodist Church, Seventh Avenue and Garden Street in Haddon Heights.
William Paul Jacobs, 99, on March 3. He was a biology professor at Princeton University where he studied the hormonal control of plant development. A memorial will take place Saturday, April 6, at noon at Mountain Lakes House.
For all his many academic accomplishments, Jacobs’ life story also contains one exceptional experience far removed from any classroom. As a graduate student in the winter of 1946, Jacobs took a weekend off to go skiing in Yosemite National Park. Encountering an icy slope, he took an alternate trail through the woods and lost his way in the mountains. He spent 11 days lost in the wilderness, surviving a blizzard and 5 degree temperatures on his first night, eating lichen and snowmelt. He was rescued only after his parents and the ski patrol had given him up for dead.
