The young men and women transforming Richmond.

by Scott Bass, Brent Baldwin, Vernal Coleman, Peter Galuszka, Don Harrison, Jack Lauterback, Melissa Scott Sinclair, Megan Southall, Deveron Timberlake, David Timberline and Sara Dabney Tisdale

Richmond loves wondering what’s wrong with itself, and how to make it right. Even more so, we like talking about it, often paying heavily for it, and binding our thoughts into pretty, hard-bound reports. That is, until we get the urge -- or a grant -- to talk some more. Naturally, a lot of the talking is by a lot of the same people.

Too bad those people don’t turn more often to the people whose actions speak louder than words. The people who are perhaps too young for country club backrooms, too busy for closed-door powerfests, too interested in the trees to wonder how to amass bigger forests.

These are the people we look for every year to fill the new class of Style Weekly’s Top 40 Under 40. They are the voices to which Richmond should listen more carefully. They’re paying attention to the changes truly needed in the community. And we hope you’re paying attention to them. — Jason Roop

Ryan N. Burnette, 32
Director - Alliance Biosciences

It started with a jar of pickled amphibians. Ryan N. Burnette was around 8 years old when his parents bought him his first dissection kit. Now he heads Alliance Biosciences, a company with Richmond ties but an increasingly global reach.

“With all of the university-related research going on here, Richmond has become Virginia’s biotech hub,” Burnette says.

Alliance Biosciences was founded in 2008 after Burnette’s father, Jim, convinced his son to help his engineering firm move into biotech. Armed with a doctorate from Virginia Tech, the younger Burnette built a company that designs and certifies clinical research labs for safety, helping to ensure that the nightmare scenario dramatized in countless disease outbreak flicks never comes to pass.

The company says it’s pulled in revenues of nearly $1 million since 2008, and added 20 new clients. One of them is Virginia, for which it recently completed a state-of-the-art autopsy lab in Manassas.

But Alliance’s pro-bono work, particularly that in HIV-ravaged Eastern Africa, is “a lot cooler,” Burnette says. He recently spent a few weeks at a small children’s home outside Nairobi, Kenya, which houses more than 100 HIV-positive orphans. When workers at its clinic realized it needed to add capacity, Alliance helped consult on the design. And this fall Alliance will work to set up tuberculosis clinics in India.

“We’re using Richmond as a base to export this expertise to the world,” Burnette says. “And that’s only going to help the industry here grow.”

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