Story Overview
Congratulations to the 2025 Faculty Innovator Award Winner!
Name: Rich Carter
Title: Professor of Chemistry & Faculty Lead for Innovation Excellence, OSU
Award Awardee: $5,000 & a desktop award
Innovator's Website: https://www.valliscor.com/
OSU Faculty Innovator Award Summary
The Faculty Innovator Award, sponsored by OSU Advantage, honors an outstanding Oregon State University inventor who has made a contribution leading to commercialization that significantly impacts their field and society. The award is open to any current OSU faculty, emeritus or retired faculty who has submitted an invention disclosure through the Advantage Office and who are actively engaged with commercializing an OSU innovation.
Award Winner
Rich Carter, Professor of Chemistry and Faculty Lead for Innovation Excellence at Oregon State University, has been honored with the 2025 Faculty Innovator Award. Carter co-founded Valliscor, an Oregon-based chemical manufacturing company, and leads Promotion and Tenure – Innovation and Entrepreneurship (PTIE), a coalition launched at OSU and supported by the National Science Foundation that is reshaping how faculty innovation and entrepreneurship are recognized in higher education.
Founded in 2012, Valliscor manufactures fluorine-containing compounds critical to pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. The company is the global leader in producing bromofluoromethane (BFM), a key material used in the manufacture of fluticasone-based medications such as Flonase™, Advair™, and Breo™, along with their generic equivalents. Valliscor also produces pentafluoropentanol (PFP), used in the breast cancer drug fulvestrant (Faslodex™), and is the sole supplier of chlorofluoropyridine (CFP) for Romvimza™, a treatment for symptomatic tenosynovial giant cell tumor.
The company recently expanded into the semiconductor sector with its first commercial product, hexafluorobutadiene (C4F6), a critical material for advanced chip production. Valliscor is currently building a 16,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Albany to scale up production, supported by more than $3 million in state and local funding.
Beyond his entrepreneurial success, Carter directs PTIE, now a coalition of more than 65 institutions. PTIE has worked with national partners such as APLU, Pew, and VentureWell, published research in Science, and in 2023 guided updates to OSU’s promotion and tenure guidelines to include innovation and entrepreneurship impact. He is also collaborating with 18 universities on a separate NSF-funded project aimed at accelerating the translation of Oregon State intellectual property into societal benefit and economic development.
The following are notable achievements and highlights in Rich Carter’s career:
- Co-founder of Valliscor (2012).
- Leader in pharmaceutical chemical supply chains, including BFM, PFP, and CFP.
- Expanded into semiconductors with C4F6; Albany facility under construction.
- Director of PTIE, an NSF-supported coalition launched at OSU with 65+ institutions.
- Guided OSU promotion and tenure reform to recognize innovation and entrepreneurship.
- Collaborating with 18 universities on NSF-funded efforts to advance OSU intellectual property.
You can learn more about Valliscor by visiting Valliscor’s website. You can learn more about PTIE by visiting ptie.org.
