Peggy L. Young, M.S., President/CEO

Peggy L. Young is President and CEO of NOVA Research Company. Peggy founded NOVA in 1986 to provide inNOVAtive research support services to Federal programs of the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health. Peggy's vision for NOVA was to facilitate the timely transfer of technology and information from research and clinical labs for use by policy makers, health care providers, and the general public. Since 1986, NOVA has maintained its core program areas and expanded into (1) grant research in the behavioral sciences; (2) software development and educational products under the Small Business Innovation Research program; (3) multimedia technology development; and (4) community outreach and recruiting.

Prior to starting her own small business, Peggy was a biochemist at Riker Labs, a pharmaceutical company in Northridge, California; a research associate at the UCLA School of Medicine, performing basic research in the laboratories of Drs. Sidney Roberts and George Popjak; and a senior lab technician at the Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center in Frederick, Maryland. She is co-author of over 20 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals.

Like most small business executives, Peggy wears many "hats" and assumes many responsibilities at NOVA. She was a hands-on senior manager for the first 5 years of operations and, for the past 10 years, has mentored other staff in management responsibilities and assumed the role of strategic planner and operations coordinator. Peggy's latest endeavor is to expand NOVA's services and products overseas. She caught the international "bug" while traveling on trade missions to Amsterdam and the Hague in the Netherlands, and Egypt, Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, South Africa, with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Embassy. As a result of contacts made through these missions, she and NOVA's Executive Vice President—and Peggy's husband—Paul Young, have begun negotiations to collaborate with a medical group in Cape Town to expand NOVA's software market.

Peggy has a Bachelor's degree in Biology from Juniata College in Huntington, Pennsylvania, and a Masters in Biochemistry from the University of California at Santa Barbara.