PRIMET PRECISION MATERIALS JOINS INSCX EXCHANGE
FEBRUARY 9, 2012

Ithaca, NY: Primet Precision Materials announces it has joined the INSCX™ Exchange (www.inscx.com) and Comdaq Exchange (www.comdaq.com) as a Principal Approved Supplier of engineered nanomaterials (NMs).

Primet will be listing engineered NMs that are manufactured with Primet’s patented low-cost NanoScission® process technology.

Primet CEO Larry Thomas notes “Primet has developed a low-cost process technology for manufacturing nanomaterials in volumes that will address the urgent need by current and emerging market applications. Growth in several application areas is now severely limited by their nanomaterial suppliers’ inability to meet the demand. Primet is well-positioned to address that need”. Mr. Thomas believes INSCX has created a mechanism that resolves the issues that have prevented widespread use of nanomaterials to transform industries.

Integrated Nano-Science and Commodity Exchange (INSCX™) CEO Charles McGovern is pleased to welcome Primet and believes that, with the acceptance of Primet’s NanoScission® methodology, we have “crossed a major stumbling block to industrial-scale process in NMs.”

Primet is working with INSCX™ in developing product specifications in order to list materials for trade on the exchange.

Primet Precision Materials is a process technology company based in Ithaca, NY and is applying its patented NanoScission® process for production of advanced nanomaterials at low-cost on an industrial-scale. For additional information, visit www.primetprecision.com.

MADE IN TOMPKINS: PRIMET PLANS TO GIVE ELECTRIC VEHICLES A BOOST
ITHACA JOURNAL, FEBRUARY 2012
By Aaron Munzer Correspondent

"Primet Precision Materials CEO Larry Thomas stands with a machine that tests the lithium-ion batteries created using the company's patented technological process. - AARON MUNZER/Contributed Photo

In the next few decades, Larry Thomas believes, every car sold in the United States will need hybrid electric power and advanced battery technology in order to meet federal mileage requirements.

“With the standards for fuel economy going where they’re going, basically every vehicle in the country will be a hybrid in some way,” he said recently in his office at the company he heads as CEO, Primet Precision Materials of Ithaca.

Thomas believes Primet has a major role to play in the transition, and could help usher in the new era with its unique nano particle material refining process.

Primet’s founder, Robert Dobbs, now the company’s chief technology officer, developed the patented technological process, called NanoScission, that reduces metals to precise particle sizes more affordably. This can help manufacturers produce more batteries for the electric vehicle industry at the lowest cost, Thomas said.

Hybrid cars utilizing electric motors need advanced battery technology to handle the energy demands of accelerating and braking quickly. For now, this means using expensive lithium-ion batteries, which are expensive to produce because of the materials involved.

“We believe we’ve found the lowest-cost way of making those materials,” he said.

The company, founded in 2004 by Dobbs, has grown over the years to a staff of 35 employees, from materials scientists and physicists to machine operators and analysts. In the spring of 2011, the company was awarded a $2.1 million research-and-development contract with the Department of Defense to demonstrate how its technology can improve military applications.

At the facility at the South Hill Business Campus, the company produces only pounds of battery materials at present, mostly for testing, with an array of different machines that process the metals in different ways, and a lab for creating small batteries called “coin cells” that Primet engineers then test for their long-term strength and performance.

Now, Thomas said, it’s been an uphill battle to convince battery manufacturing companies such as Dow, LG and 3M to license Primet’s technology for use in their battery assembly lines, most of which also have in-house efforts under way to realize more affordable techniques. The effort sees Thomas travel the world with his sales pitch, from Germany to Japan.

“I know in my bones the the industry will adopt our technique,” he said. “Eventually we’ll produce the material, maybe, but more likely is that we’ll partner with a bigger company and either license our technology or create a joint venture.”

Thomas said the company has been helped by the proximity to both Cornell University and Binghamton University, both of which are Energy Frontier Research Centers, funded by the Department of Energy for battery research, and have given the company access to state-of-the-art technology for their work.

Company engineer Archit Lal first came to Primet in 2004, and said he has remained because he believes in the company’s technology.

“I don’t see cost competitiveness in other processes,” he said. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think so.”

Key to creating the electrification of transport in the future will be our ability to deliver an affordable battery pack. However, Larry Thomas, president of Primet Precision Materials, questions whether we are going the right way about it.

OF HYBRIDS AND HAMBURGERS
BATTERIES INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 2012

If you’ve spent any time at automotive battery conferences, you’ve seen plenty of presentations by researchers claiming to have developed the Next Great Battery Chemistry that’s going to reduce the cost and extend the range of tomorrow’s electric vehicles.

The battery researchers describe their chemistries and batteries with figures like milliamp-hours per gram, kilowatts per kilogram, kilowatts per litre, and dollars per kilowatt-hour.

You’ve also heard officials from auto OEMs, industry consortia and government agencies describe their targets for the performance, size, weight and cost of the future battery. They describe their vehicles with figures like miles per gallon, miles per charge, minutes per charge, and charge-cycles per life.

Those of us in the chemical industry think a little differently.

When we look at a Cadillac Escalade with the Platinum trim package that retails for $82,585, we see a vehicle that weighs 5,694 pounds. We describe this vehicle in the same figures we use to describe transactions between chemical companies and their customers. This car costs $15/lb.

By contrast, a Chevy Aveo subcompact at the other end of the General Motors line lists for $11,965 and weighs 2,568 lbs. This car costs $5/lb.

Put another way, the top-end luxury vehicle sells for about the same price as a filet mignon from your local butcher, and an entry-level subcompact sells for the price of lean ground beef.

This pricing relationship has held true for decades. But it shifts from being an academic curiosity to an “industry imperative” when it’s applied to an EV battery pack.

A plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt carries a 16-kWh battery that weighs 435 pounds. The general consensus is that packs of this size are being sold to the auto OEMs at roughly $700/kWh.

Applying our metric we come to a sobering figure: This battery costs $25/ lb.

Which means as an industry, if we want to see electrification of vehicles in all categories including that entrylevel subcompact, we have to find a way to deliver a battery pack with filet mignon performance for the price of good ground beef.

And our starting point is almost twice as expensive as the filet.

To achieve those cost reductions, the battery industry has focused its attention on the cathode and anode. Rightly so. These materials determine the performance of a battery. They’re also the most expensive components of the battery both in terms of dollars-perpound and dollars-per-pack.

But too much of the effort to reduce those costs has focused on the wrong problem. The vast majority of university, industry and government funding has gone into the search for the magic combination of alkali and transition metals that will deliver the greatest charge per unit weight or volume.

Lost in this conversation is a much simpler and more important question: How are we going to reduce the cost of those materials in dollars-per-pound?

As an industry, we’ve made improvements by substituting expensive cobalt with less expensive metals like iron, aluminium and manganese. Despite this “success”, today’s anode and cathode materials still typically sell for $10 to $20 per pound – filet mignon prices that don’t reflect the low cost of the base ores.

The problem is that the cost of the base mineral ore is not what drives the cost of these advanced materials.

Lithium iron phosphate (LFP), for example, may trace its roots back to minerals like spodumene, hematite and phosphate rock that are pulled from the earth and available in massive quantities for under a dollar a pound.

But on their way from the mine to battery fab, those ores must undergo a series of progressively more expensive and painstaking multi-step manufacturing processes to create the highlyengineered cathode material that the battery makers buy.

And these costs are only going up with the next generation of battery materials., many of which are based on exotic multi-phase and nanostructures that will be even more expensive to make – even if they’re made from “low-cost” materials like iron, manganese and silicon.

Many industry analysts say that costs will come down as the scale of production increases, a refrain often echoed by materials producers themselves.

We need to recognize that incremental improvements of current manufacturing processes will not deliver the step-change in costs that the auto industry demands – not even for the cathode materials that are in use today.

Production of electrode materials for lithium ion batteries is a mature, 20 year old business. Worldwide production is over 100,000 tons per year. Producers of consumer-sized cells have been under withering price pressure for a decade, and have placed enormous competitive pressure on their suppliers. It’s reasonable to suspect that most incremental costs that can be wrung from traditional production methods have already been realized.

Analysis of the production technologies used to make electrode materials confirms this suspicion. These processes rely on unit operations like co-precipitation, spray-drying and calcining. These are processes that have been used in the chemical industry for decades, if not centuries.

Production by these methods has reached the limits of cost and scale: They are already as large as possible while maintaining process conditions that will make materials within specifications. There are no additional economies of scale to be gained by building a spray-dry tower that’s six stories tall instead of the five-story units in service today. No one is proposing to build a calcining oven that’s 50 metres long to improve on the economics of the 40-metre units found in today’s plants.

The only economics-of-scale for which the materials industry has line-of-sight is to build plants with four production lines under each roof instead of two.

Further, the process requirements of next-generation materials are even more exacting. Tremendous process R&D work is required to make any of the high-voltage electrode materials being discussed today in conventional industrial-scale process equipment. In fact, there are good reasons to doubt whether some of these materials can be made in an industrial setting at all.

Yet the development of advanced manufacturing processes has received a small fraction of the R&D funding and almost none of the attention at any level in our industry. This has to change.

Put another way, our problem is not the cost of the meat on the bone. And the solution is not to find cheaper cows.

The flavour of battery chemistry involved doesn’t matter. The cost of producing the advanced materials used in those batteries matters a great deal. Our priority as an industry must be to find cheaper manufacturing process technology to transform basic minerals into advanced materials at the lowest possible cost.

There are many such efforts underway. My company is taking a cleansheet approach to particle processing, which could radically reduce the capital and energy cost of electrode materials manufacturing. The US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory has established a new centre focused on process R&D and materials scale-up.

But initiatives like these garner a disproportionately small amount of attention from our own industry, let alone from the universities, government and the auto OEMs that can shift the battery conversation from “new molecules” to “new manufacturing techniques”.

Funding priorities need to shift as well, with resources applied at all stages from basic process R&D to deployment. It’s only through radically different process technology that we can hope to make battery packs that will deliver filet mignon performance in an EV that sells to consumers on a ground-beef budget.

Larry Thomas is the president of Primet Precision Materials, a process technology company based in Ithaca, NY that’s applying its patented NanoScission process for production of advanced electrode materials at low cost on an industrial scale. Visit www.primetprecision.com.

SLASHING THE COSTS OF EV BATTERY PRODUCTION
AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRIES MAGAZINE, JANUARY 2012

With every major OEM now in the race to produce affordable electric vehicles (EVs), the focus is on ways of bringing down the cost of manufacturing and ownership — and that of the battery in particular.

“Meeting those cost goals will require innovation across the entire battery value chain,” says Larry Thomas, president and CEO of Primet Precision Materials based in Ithaca, New York. The Obama administration has poured $2.4 billion to spur commercialization of electric-vehicle batteries, battery materials and charging infrastructure. Obama wants to see a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015 as the US competes against China, Japan and other Asian countries for the lead. That will only happen if the cost of ownership of an EV is competitive against that of a gasoline or diesel–powered vehicle.

The market for lithium-ion (LIB) batteries (both automotive and other uses) is predicted to reach US$70-billion by 2019 mainly due to the expanding demand for EVs and hybrid vehicles. The current cost of lithium ion batteries for vehicles is around US$1,000 per kWh.

A substantial percentage of this cost is the cathode powder used in lithium ion batteries. Using existing production techniques, the cost to battery makers of this essential component is expected to be around US$14-billion – an expense which has to halve if LIB batteries are to be competitive.

“The electrode materials are the single largest component of the battery’s cost. The chemical industry must deploy new process technology that provides a way to make those materials in large-volume, with high performance, at substantially lower costs. The industry must develop breakthrough technology to enable domestic battery production for both military and civilian applications at costs and performance that make EVs competitive in the market,” says Thomas.

To meet that goal, Primet believes that the suppliers of electrode materials to battery manufacturers must reduce their production costs by 60% or more. At least seven of the world’s 20 largest chemical companies are targeting the battery material market, according to Thomas. Primet, in turn, is focusing on supporting the chemical companies.

“A true breakthrough process must convert mineral sources into finished electrode powder with a fraction of the energy required by traditional methods, and a far shorter production time in a radically reduced physical plant,” said Robert Dobbs, Chief Technology Officer at Primet Precision. “Coupling those attributes with our water-based process will allow us to stake our claim as a truly enabling next-generation clean technology.”

Traditional technologies used to make small chemical particles consume large amounts of energy and produce inconsistent materials. This results in inefficient use of resources and reduces the ability to scale production, according to Thomas. He compares the present situation with that of photovoltaic cell production, where it used to take more energy to produce a photovoltaic cell than it would produce in its lifetime. Primet’s patented NanoScission suite of technologies shears particles instead of crushing or grinding them. The result is the scalable production of uniform crystals to any specified size. Particle uniformity allows them to be “easily handled” in the battery electrode manufacturing process.

Automotive Industries (AI) asked Thomas what materials can be produced using the NanoScission process.

Thomas: We have to accept there is no “next great” cathode material. There will be a number of solutions. Chemists are making wonderful new materials that are also fantastically difficult and expensive to produce in commercial quantities. We have tried to develop technology that allows you to make any of these materials in large volumes at low cost, and with performance at close as possible to theoretical maximum. More and more, the conversation is being dominated by engineers asking how do we make this, and how do we make it cheaper? Our challenge as engineers is to find ways of bringing the material to market, and to produce it at the thousands of tons scale. We believe that our NanoScission process can do this cost-effectively with a wide range of materials — even those that are still being developed.

AI: What is the underlying chemistry – how can one technology provide multiple solutions?

Thomas: Battery materials are crystals. The challenge is to find cost-effective ways to make the crystals. Essentially, what the suppliers of battery materials are doing is taking raw mineral sources – iron oxide, cobalt oxide, lithium etc and upgrading them by one or two steps, and combining them to create an electro-active material that is sold to the battery company. A truly novel process technology should be able to make multiple materials that the battery industry needs to solve its problems.

AI: Where NanoScission fit in?

Thomas: Both in the cost of building and operating the plants. One of the rules of thumb you use in the chemical industry is that, for every dollar of annual revenue, you have to invest one dollar in the plant. If you look at the projected demand of cathode and anode material, it runs into tens of billions of dollars. There aren’t many companies in the world that can invest US$10-billion in new facilities, or have the engineering skills required to design, build and operate plants at that scale. To put it into perspective, it is estimated that the entire US chemical industry invested about US$15-billion on new plant for new products over the past 10 years. It’s not reasonable to think that the industry can deploy that much capital over the next 10 years solely for the EV battery industry. The chemical industry must adopt process technology that can reduce the cost of building those plants by 50% or more to have a chance of meeting the oncoming demand.

Operating costs are also going to have to be significantly lower. Existing technology is a very energy intensive process, and again that means high costs to convert raw materials to finished goods. A combination of lower capital and energy costs for critical battery materials will take hundreds, if not thousands of dollars out of the cost of each battery pack. A bonus is that making the production process less capital and energy intensive makes it greener, and reduces the environmental impact of batteries. The last thing we want to have to debate is how much it costs to produce a battery, and how much waste is generated in the process.

AI: What changes will have to be made in the way batteries are built?

Thomas: New process technology for materials should not require any change in the chemistry of the battery components or the battery manufacturing process itself. Our industry’s challenge is to deliver the powder to the battery manufacturer at a lower cost. There is a low risk to the OEM, because they will be using existing technology.

AI: Where next for the technology?

Thomas: We think our process technology has the potential to transform the way battery materials are made. What we are looking to do at the moment is to partner with larger companies that can take the technology to market. We believe our technology can deliver substantial improvements to the way today’s battery materials are made, as well as facilitate the commercial production of the new materials being developed in laboratories and universities. It does not matter how good the material looks on paper or in the laboratory if it is not available in large volumes and at low cost.

by Ed Richardson
Copyright Automotive Industries

HINCHEY BRINGS ITHACA-BASED PRIMET CEO TO CAPITOL HILL FOR MILITARY BATTERY TECHNOLOGY FORUM

WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 — Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y. (22nd CD), issued the following news release: Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), the founder of the Defense Energy Security Caucus, today hosted Larry Thomas of Ithaca-based Primet Precision Materials and representatives from the U.S. Army and Marine Corps for a discussion on how the military can employ efficient batteries to reduce the weight load carried by soldiers in the field. The briefing was widely attended by members of Congress, congressional staffers, think tank representatives, defense industry experts and members of the U.S. military.

“Our troops can be loaded with more than 100 pounds of equipment, including body armor, water and batteries,” said Hinchey. “With that large burden, they aren’t able to be as agile or effective as possible. High tech batteries are a good way in which we can further cut down on that weight. I secured $8 million in federal funding to help Primet develop technologies that can be deployed in the field to accomplish this goal. That’s why I invited Larry Thomas to Washington for this talk. His firm is on the cutting edge of this field, and he’s got a lot of important information to share with Members of Congress.” The mission of the Defense Energy Security Caucus, which Hinchey co-founded, is to educate members of Congress and the public about the strategic value of utilizing conservation, efficiency and sustainable energy sources for the U.S. military; highlight and support established and emerging defense energy initiatives; and to help find solutions to energy challenges facing the Armed Forces and the Department of Defense.

The caucus is a forum through which the DoD, the Armed Forces, energy industry and members of Congress can exchange ideas and give defense energy security policy an additional synergistic platform that will contribute to mission success, protect lives, save money and safeguard the environment.

The $8 million Hinchey previously secured in federal investments for Primet is for the development of advanced battery technologies for the Pentagon. The federal funding allowed Primet to form a unique partnership with Applied Materials, a major semiconductor company, as well as Cornell University and Binghamton University, two well-established research universities with expertise in this field.

TNS Radhar67-111104-JF78-3662602 StaffFurigay (c) 2011 Targeted News Service

Read the remarks from Primet’s CEO Larry Thomas before the Defense Energy Security Caucus (DESC)

PRIMET PRECISION SIGNS $2.1 MILLION U.S. ARMY CONTRACT BY HINCHEY TO FURTHER ADVANCED BATTERY TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH

Contract will Help Continue Finger Lake Job Growth in Growing Green-Tech Field

Ithaca, NY (April 28, 2011)- Primet Precision Materials, Inc. today announced that it has signed a Department of Defense contract secured through the direct efforts of Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) for a research and development program to enable the production of advanced performance lithium ion batteries at a substantially lower cost than current manufacturing processes.

The one-year program in concert with the Army Research Lab will provide $2.1 million in funding to Primet to demonstrate the utility of its NanoScission® process technology in the production of a wide range of materials of interest to the United States Army. Hinchey used his seat on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee to secure the funding as part of the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill

“We’re very pleased to partner with the Army Research Laboratory,” said Larry Thomas, CEO of Primet. “The ARL is one of the world’s leading material science and energy research centers. The importance of this research and its impact on such a wide variety of sectors, military and commercial, is substantial. This project would not have been possible without the hard work of Congressman Hinchey who secured the funding. We are thankful that it is now moving forward.”

“The Pentagon is the largest consumer of energy in the world, so developing new energy efficient technologies doesn’t just save taxpayer money, it also makes us more secure,” said Hinchey. “Companies like Primet are creating good local jobs through the development of advanced batteries for the military. Eventually, the technology they develop will be used for consumer products, like more fuel-efficient vehicles that can be linked to a smart energy grid that runs on solar, wind and other renewable power sources. This contract is an important step forward in our efforts to make New York a hub for new energy jobs. I’m so proud of what we have been able to accomplish.

In addition to the funding announced today, Hinchey also helped secure $5 million that is being used for the advanced battery consortium that is enabling Primet and Applied Materials to work together on developing advanced batteries that can, among other applications, more efficiently and effectively store energy generated through solar technology.

The contract will demonstrate the benefits of Primet’s NanoScission® technology on a variety of electrode materials that are of interest to the Army for use in high-voltage lithium ion battery cells. These next-generation materials are needed to create batteries that are smaller, lighter, safer and more powerful than existing batteries for military applications including handheld devices, vehicles and off-grid power generation. They are also of great interest in commercial applications including hybrid and electric vehicles for their high performance characteristics and potential for high-volume production at low costs.

“The electrode materials define the energy capacity of a battery,” Mr. Thomas added. “They’re also the single largest component of the battery’s cost. Primet’s technology provides a way to make those materials in large-volume, with high performance, at substantially lower costs than conventional technologies. Our success in this program will enable domestic battery production for both military and civilian applications at costs and performance among the best in the world.”

Work on the program will start immediately at Primet’s laboratory and production facility in Ithaca, New York.

Primet to Partner with Cornell to Develop Novel Electrolytes for Advanced Batteries

March 23, 2010 | Ithaca, NY | Cornell University and Primet Precision Materials, Inc. are partnering to develop a family of novel electrolytes for advanced batteries with improved safety, temperature and voltage performance. The project employs breakthrough technology to address several primary challenges facing Li ion batteries (LIB) for electric vehicles, including the need for a wider operating temperature range and for higher energy and power density.

The new family of battery electrolytes will be developed using nanoparticle-based hybrid liquids and gels derived from a new materials platform, nanoscale ionic materials (NIMS), recently discovered and developed at Cornell. Primet will support the transition of this new technology to the marketplace by demonstrating the scalable production of these improved electrolytes that is required for commercialization.

An R&D team from Cornell and Primet has been assembled with complementary expertise in synthesis, processing, electrochemical characterization and battery testing and evaluation. “Collaboration with Primet is important to the success of the project,” noted David Jung, Assistant Director of the KAUST-Cornell Center for Energy and Sustainability, who authored the proposal for the project. “This partnership will provide an invaluable nanomaterials processing and scale-up component and will help enable rapid commercial transition of discoveries emerging from the project.”

“We’re excited about the prospects of this novel technology to address one of the most difficult materials science problems in the LIB world, “ said Primet CEO Larry Thomas. “We have a long history of successful collaboration with Cornell, and are sure that this will be another.

The project is being funded by a grant from The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) through the New York Battery and Energy Storage (NY-BEST) consortium. It is one of nineteen energy-storage projects recently selected by NYSERDA for their potential to strengthen New York’s standing as a national leader in the energy storage industry and help build New York’s clean energy economy for the future.

The awards were announced March 10, 2010 at the NY-BEST annual meeting.  NY-BEST is an industry-focused coalition working to further the development and manufacture of an advanced battery and energy storage sector in New York State by capitalizing on New York’s existing broad base of energy storage companies and research centers.
Read more:
http://mse.cornell.edu/news/profile.cfm?id=24082
http://www.nyserda.org/Press_Releases/2010/PressReleas20100310_3.asp

Primet Receives First Defense Contract, Commences Work on Consortium Project for US DOD

Oct 14, 2010 | Ithaca, NY | Primet was recently awarded its first formal contract with the US Department of Defense and began work on its project to develop a Li-ion cell system that is lower in cost and higher in performance than cells with conventional graphite/lithium cobalt oxide or graphite/lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide electrodes. Primet is working with Applied Materials, Cornell University and Binghamton University in a consortium that will carry out this project for the US Army’s Communications-Electronics, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC). Primet will focus on materials synthesis and characterization, harnessing its novel process technology for engineering and producing electrode-active materials.

Over the summer, Primet put in place procedures and policies necessary to comply with the requirements of the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) and negotiated the contract with CERDEC. The contract was signed September 30^th.

Primet CEO to Speak at MIT Enterprise Forum

Primet CEO Larry Thomas will be one of three panel speakers at the Cleantech: Scaling to Growth Forum being presented by the MIT Enterprise Forum of NYC on January 25, 2011. Mr. Thomas will speak on Primet’s path to securing funding as the company seeks to scale manufacturing for its proven advanced lithium ion battery materials to full commercial volume.

The event will be hosted by New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business.

Read more:
http://www.mitef-nyc.org/

Primet CEO Larry Thomas Joins Board of Directors of the Child Advocacy Center of Lehigh County

Primet CEO Larry Thomas has accepted an invitation to serve on the Board of Directors of the Child Advocacy Center of Lehigh County.

The nationally accredited Child Advocacy Center of Lehigh County (CAC-LC) hosts a multidisciplinary team to ensure delivery of an immediate, coordinated and effective response when a child is abused. The child- focused Center reduces the trauma and the long-term devastating effects that abuse has on its victims. The Center exists to provide healing and justice for our most vulnerable citizens. The CAC works to make victims children again.

Said Barbara Stauffer, Director of the CAC-LC, ” We are pleased to welcome Larry Thomas to the Board of Directors. To have a board member with Larry’s business acumen, and his extensive record of community service is of great benefit to the Center. We are grateful for his commitment to the children.