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Partnership with Oak Ridge will breed more success

Beginning this spring, The University of Alabama in Huntsville will welcome a team of professionals from Oak Ridge National Laboratory to their new office on the university’s campus. As part of a recently established partnership between two of the premiere scientific and technology centers in the southeastern United States, the office will facilitate intensive, on-going collaborations in academic and research programs in a number of areas vital to national security and economic development.

The Oak Ridge-Huntsville Partnership Office will also foster joint opportunities with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the U.S. Army, and contractors at both Redstone Arsenal and Cummings Research Park. Additional partnerships will draw in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, and Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

The Oak Ridge-Huntsville Partnership Office was made possible in large measure by the vision and support of the Alabama and Tennessee congressional delegations, led by Congressmen Bud Cramer and Zach Wamp.

UAHuntsville’s students will all take an active role in the partnership, which will include internships, co-ops, and research at the masters and doctoral levels. Faculty and research staff will take advantage of funding provided through summer research residencies and sabbaticals at Oak Ridge National Laboratory facilities in Tennessee.

The technological infrastructure of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Livermore National Laboratory is absolutely unique. For example, the National Center for Computational Sciences houses the Cray XT Jaguar supercomputer, the world’s most powerful computer devoted to open scientific research, and the National Ignition Facility houses the highest-energy laser ever built. By the same token, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other Department of Energy staff will have access to the full range of science and technology capabilities at UAHuntsville and its surrounding high-tech community.

Huntsville and Oak Ridge have a long and important history of collaboration, including the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Moon Missions. Indeed, the intellectual capital and technology infrastructure that led to the success of those historic endeavors have continued to grow in the ensuing years. Since 2000, the Huntsville and Oak Ridge communities have held annual Tennessee Valley Corridor summits to advance our federal missions and to create new investments, programs, and jobs in both the public and private sectors.

The joint efforts have contributed in very substantial ways to the quality of UAHuntsville, where incoming freshman boast the highest academic credentials of any public university in the state of Alabama, and the faculty and research staff bring in federal funding which is higher than any comparably-sized university in the United States. The excellence of UAHuntsville’s faculty, research staff, and students has thus emerged as a major contributor to the success of BRAC. As the quality and quantity of research and academic programs grows, more and more engineers, scientists, and business people are attracted to Northern Alabama, and success continues to breed more success.

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