March/2016
 AlabamaGermany Partnership   500 Beacon Parkway West   Birmingham   AL 35209

                   205-943-4772         www.AlabamaGermany.org           E-mail                           
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In This Issue
AGP's 2016 Annual Celebration Dinner
Thank You Sponsors
RadioBro opens Germany Office
New phase for Alabama Robotics Technology Park
Why auto suppliers need to confront their brain drain
Embracing Millennials
Educational Corner
 
Dankesch�n to our PATRON Members:


 
 
 
 
Mercedes




    
 

 
What to do in Alabama

April 1-2
Opp
 
April 7-10
Birmingham

April 9 - Dec 10
Birmingham

April 15 - May 21
Monroeville

April 16-17
Cullman

April 22-24
Birmingham

April 22-24
Leeds

April 30
Auburn

April 30 - May 1
Montgomery


Save the Dates
 
Dankesch�n to our SUSTAINING Members:


 


     BLG

 
 
 
 Lufthansa 

 
 
Siemens  
 
TUVRheinland 

    
   
  
German Word 
of the Month
German Idioms
New AGP Members
 
Corporation/Patron
Emmett McLean


Corporation/Regular
CJ Richardson


Corporation/Regular
Ken Suda


Corporation / Associate
Andrew Reichel


Corporation / Associate
Dara Steele


Corporation / Associate
Christa Dransfield


Corporation / Associate
Kirk Atkinson


Corporation / Associate
Vikki Grodner
The Grodner Group and G Design


Individual / Patron
Anika Schurmann
Lori LaBoone

 
AGP Member News 
Events & Seminars Offered by AGP Members
AGP
Executive Committee
AGP Affiliates
Contact Us
Join Our List
2016 Annual Celebrtaion Dinner 
By Tine Hoffmeister






We "hit it out of the ball park" at AlabamaGermany Partnership's 18th Annual Celebration Dinner at Regions Field earlier this month. We had record numbers in attendees and on the behalf of AGP's Board of Directors we want to give thanks to all who attended, participated and sponsored the event. 

We received a warm welcome from AGP Chair Warren McCullars and Johnathan Austin, President, Birmingham City Council. Emcee for the night was Rick Davis, Birmingham Business Alliance. Remarks was made by Thomas W�lfing, Deputy Consul General of Federal Republic of Germany and Greg Canfield, Secretary of Commerce. Our guest speaker, Jonathan Nelson, General Manager, Birmingham Barons encouraged all to come back for a Barons baseball game. 

AGP presented awards to 15 new and expanding German companies: 
  • Aviagen North America, Huntsville
  • BLG Logistics Inc, Vance                         
  • Diehl Aerospace, Sterrett                       
  • Eissmann Group Automotive, Pell City                      
  • Evonik Industries, Birmingham               
  • Jenoptik Optical Systems Inc, Huntsville
  • Kemmerich USA, L.P., Auburn                       
  • Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, Vance                        
  • Polyaminde High Performance, Scottsboro
  • REHAU Automotive, Cullman
  • SafeTweave, Scottsboro
  • Schmidt Automotive USA, L.P., Auburn 
  • SMP Automotive Systems Alabama, Inc., Northport       
  • SWJ - BREILMANN U.S. LLC, Tuscaloosa                 
  • WKW Erbsloeb Automotive, Pell City                       

The Barbara Fischer Education Award was presented to Dr. Angela Ferguson, Samford University by Dr. Thomas Fox, University of Alabama. You can read more about Dr. Ferguson further down in the newsletter. 

We were proud to surprise this year's Rainer Bauer Award winner with the help of Greg Barker, Alabama Power and Rainer Bauer himself. Don Erwin, Barber Companies and past AGP chair, received the Rainer Bauer Award, in honor of his outstanding accomplishments, dedicated service and loyal friendship to the AlabamaGermany Partnership both in Alabama and in Germany. 

The following day many joined us for AGP's Business Forum - Innovation, Getting Ahead in the Global, Knowledge-Based Economy. We learned what was happening in the start-up scene in the Birmingham area and how the Community College System keeps up with changes and needs in today's knowledge-based economy. We were also join by "real life" start-up businesses Trim Tab Brewing Company and RadioBro Corporation. Presenters included:  Jennifer Skjellum, TechBirmingham;  Devon Laney, Innovation Depot; and  Dr. Tim Alford, Alabama Community College System; Harris Stewart, Trim Tab Brewing Co. and Mark Becnel, RadioBro Corporation. 

 

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS

AGP's Annual Celebration Dinner would not be possible without our dinner committee, dedicated volunteers and generous sponsors: 


Huntsville high-tech startup RadioBro opens Germany office
By Made in Alabama

Alexander Vorwerk and Andreas Gerber of BremenInvest join Nathanial Long and Mark Becnel of RadioBro and Kirk Atkinson of Birmingham's Adah International at RadioBro's Bremen office. (Image: RadioBro)

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - RadioBro Corp., a start-up firm that makes miniature electronics systems for airplanes and spacecraft, has opened an office in Bremen, Germany, as it targets connections in the European aerospace industry.

Brothers Mark, Eric and Daniel Becnel founded RadioBro in Huntsville in March 2014. The firm's products include MiniSatCom, a lightweight spacecraft radio, and Cyclone, an instrumentation system that records data from flight tests.

Made In Alabama profiled RadioBro last year as Mark and Eric Becnel, twins who received master's degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, traveled to the Paris Air Show for a test of the Cyclone system.


AlabamaGermany Partnership is proud to have Mark Becnel, RadioBro as a member of AGP's Young Professional group. 

AGP's Young Professionals Next Meetup 

Please join us for the next AGP's Young Professional meetup:

Thursday, April 14, 2016
6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Regions Field, Birmingham

Come on out for a Baron's game! We will meet at the gate at 6 pm (please note the General Admission is $ 7.00). It is the first "Thirsty Thursday" which means $2 soft drink, beer and wine specials. Let's grab drinks and sit in the picnic area where we can go over the agenda to move forward before the first pitch at 7 pm. We can watch the game together and continue to network.

Don't miss it! Make sure to REGISTER so we know you plan to join us.

The Young Professionals group is under the AlabamaGermany Partnership umbrella. Its members are interns, co-op or employees of either an Alabama-Germany company or institution. The age requirement is 21 to 39. This also includes college students, grad students studying German language, international business, science and engineering. The group will promote international education, individual career development and promotion of Alabama-German companies and workforce development. 


Alabama Robotics Technology Park moves forward with newest phase
By Birmingham Business Journal

The AIDT Alabama Robotics Technology Park (RTP) in North Alabama will soon see its campus expand, with its newest facility expected to open in the first quarter of 2016.

The RTP currently consists of two buildings - which serve as training centers for potential employees in the automotive and manufacturing sectors, according to a report from Area Development.


The new addition will bring the number of buildings on the campus to three.

The newest phase consists of the Integration, Entrepreneurial and Paint/Dispense Center, which will allow companies to train employees in manual paint spraying techniques and robotic dispense training.
"With new companies moving to and existing companies expanding in Alabama, AIDT is continuously upgrading its services as a training organization," said AIDT's Executive Director Ed Castile.

Why auto suppliers need to confront their brain drain
By Automotive News

It's cold comfort to the auto supply industry that its current brain drain is a sign of a bright future. Top talent isn't abandoning the automotive industry, necessarily. It's just moving to the innovators in the car market, many of them makers of self-driving and electric cars.

This is happening even as traditional automakers aim to compete with and perhaps join this automotive avant-garde.

As unlikely as it might have been for a young mechanical engineer to imagine herself or himself someday working for Google or Apple, that's what's happening. There is a finite pool of talent, and for now, at least, it's the supply industry that is experiencing outflow. For instance, battery firm A123 Systems and Apple earlier this year settled a suit where A123 claimed the iPhone maker was aggressively poaching its engineers.


Embracing Millennials
By Dr. Burt Lohoff-Gaida
 
At 45%, Millennials have overtaken Baby Boomers (31%) as the largest segment of the American workforce. That's roughly 83 million able-bodied workers between the ages of 16 and 35. What's really interesting about this demography is that American companies often misunderstand them. If you don't understand them, how can you find and retain the best and the brightest? That's a recipe for disaster.

Millennials have gotten a bad rap, sometimes justifiably so. Some call them narcissistic; others say they have an entitlement mentality. Is this a fair stereotype and if so, where does it come from?

 
German Teacher in Alabama


Dr. Angela Ferguson,
Director of International Education & Director of the German program
Samford University, Birmingham

Dr. Ferguson grew up in Germany (Kaiserslautern, Rheinland-Pfalz) and moved to the United States as a teenager with her parents and younger brother and sister.  

Her experiences living in Germany as a young person led to her love of the German language and culture, and so she studied German and French as an undergraduate at the University of Southern Mississippi and Germanic Studies at the University of Texas, where she completed her Ph.D. in 2013 (Focus: 17th-century German literature).  

Prior to moving to Birmingham, Dr. Ferguson spent two years living in Germany again, one in Berlin and the other in Greifswald. She started working at Samford in August 2004 as an instructor of German, with Dr. Terry Pickett, who was the Director of the German program until his retirement. She became Director of International Initiatives at Samford in 2012, and became Director of International Education in 2013. Upon completing her Ph.D., she became Assistant Professor of German and Director of the German Program (January 2014).  

Dr. Ferguson currently holds both positions as the Director of International Education and Director of the German program at Samford, where she is happy to work with her colleague Brad Burckel, a UA graduate in German who does an excellent job for Samford University teaching the lower division language courses.  She teaches all of the upper-level German courses, which focus on German literature, culture, film, history and business. They lead study abroad trips to Bamberg, Germany each summer, where people can take German courses in an immersion context, and she also teach a German conversation course available to anyone in the community on Monday evenings (for more information click here).  


AlabamaGermany Partnership was delighted to present the 2016 Barbara Fischer Education Award to Dr. Angela Ferguson at AGP's 18th Annual Celebration Dinner in Birmingham earlier this month. 
 
AGP Membership 2016

Still not an AGP member? Please consider joining our organization today and enjoy the many benefits that comes with AGP membership. 

2015 turned out to be another busy year for our organization. We started the year by hosting our first Educational Summit at AIDT's new training facility in downtown Birmingham. Our 17th Annual dinner was rather cold but successful at the Aircraft Pavilion at the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park in Mobile.
 
We have also hosted: Several German Culinary Dinners in Birmingham, Auburn and Tuscaloosa; BLG Logistics Plant Tour in Vance; Luncheon and Tour of REHAU Automotive in Cullman. We continued to host the German Business committee meetings and offered "German 101 for American Business Executives" workshop. We added a new event - New Member Reception; and celebrated "Fall of the Wall" - the 26th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall with a social networking event. In the spring AGP had the opportunity to support the Alabama Chapter of American Association of Teachers of German meeting. We have also been able to sponsor several educational and cultural programs like the Oktoberfest weekend, Goethe Institute visit to local high school, the Lantern Festival at Tuscaloosa Academy and the German Christmas Market at Das Haus.

This year we have already hosted a very successful 18th Annual Celebration Dinner at Regions Field in Birmingham with record attendance. A brand new group - Young Professionals - was started under the AGP umbrella.  
 
In order to continue to grow our program, we hope you will renew/sign up for membership for 2016. Your support will help us keep provide new programming and our ability to connect businesses, organizations, governments, and individuals.

For more information on corporate membership and benefits  click here! 
 



AlabamaGermany Partnership | 500 Beacon Parkway West | Birmingham | AL | 35209