Downloadable qualifications document

The following provides a brief background of Michael Rouse and Urna Vitae LLC.

Michael P. Rouse

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I have over 30 years experience in fine chemical, food, biofuels, and biotechnology process development, manufacturing operations and manufacturing plant design. My expertise includes large-scale bacterial and fungal fermentations to produce organic and amino acids, industrial enzymes and biopesticides; corn refining; and biotransformations. I have been a lead process engineer or a consultant for half a dozen $100 million plus new or expanded manufacturing plant projects and have experience working with large engineering and architectural design teams. I have been consulting independently since 2011, first through a sole proprietorship under my own name and then, starting in 2016, through Urna Vitae LLC.

Urna Vitae LLC

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My business activities and personal interests have always spanned much of the tree of life and I have grown, in culture, organisms from all three current domains as we know them (Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya). When I decided to form a limited liability company, I wanted a name that reflected this diversity. What many of my business activities have in common is the culture of life in containers: Culture tubes, shake flasks, culture jars, stirred jars, stainless steel fermentors and pots full of ornamental plants. This was the inspiration for the choice of a Latin binomial. With apologies to Latin scholars, who will undoubtedly point out that Urna Vitae is not grammatically correct, the name was selected to reflect this common theme.

In the simplest translation, Google translates Urna Vitae as “Pot Life”. Some of the translations for “urna” alone include waterpot, water-jar, money-pot, and money-jar. Urna is also the “third eye” in Buddhist art and culture, symbolizing a state of enlightenment. These all seemed relevant to my consulting business, making Urna a good choice for half of the company name.

Most of us are familiar with “vitae” from “curriculum vitae”, which Wikipedia says translates to “the course of your life”. Wiktionary defines “Vitae” as a proper noun having the historical meaning of “the taxonomic category for all life”. This, then, seemed to be exactly what I was looking for to complete the Latin binomial and Urna Vitae LLC was born.

Horticulture

Recently, I came across the form I filled out when I started college at Penn State. It listed the three expressed preferences for a major that I had indicated on my application: Microbiology, Biochemistry and Horticulture. Ultimately, I obtained a biochemistry degree, mostly because my undergraduate advisor was a biochemist and he steered me in that direction. While still an undergraduate, I realized that what I really wanted to be was a biochemical engineer and after a few years I obtained my master’s degree in chemical engineering. However, I never lost interest in horticulture and wherever I traveled around the US and the world, I always collected plants and seeds for my garden.

In 2001, I took a break from my biochemical engineering career and founded Great Lake Gardens as a rare and unusual plant nursery. Ultimately, I realized that retail plant sales is not one of my strengths and returned to engineering. However, the experience taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of really understanding a business before trying to enter it and of developing a complete and realistic business plan. I also discovered that the technical and intellectual challenges of plant breeding were the more interesting aspects of horticulture. These could use the facilities and equipment I had acquired for the nursery and my experience in sterile culture, biochemistry and microbiology from my biochemical engineering background. This, in turn, has led to a number of horticulture and plant biotechnology projects at Urna Vitae and for clients.

Have Red Pen Will Travel

I’m a firm believer in getting a design right on paper before trying to build it. When I review a specification or a drawing, I compare it to all available information to make sure it is technically correct. This often consumes considerable red (real or electronic) ink and it is not uncommon for me to return a set of drawings or specifications with several hundred comments. Always having a red pen in my pocket and traveling for hire on behalf of my clients reminded me of Paladin and his famous calling card. This, in turn, inspired the Have Red Pen Will Travel logo.