UAH's entry into the Oak Ridge Associated University consortium will allow the local school to participate in more scientific research projects, UAH President David Williams said Thursday.

 

Williams and Ron Townsend, president of ORAU, signed an agreement at the Tennessee Valley Corridor National Summit in Huntsville that gives students and faculty at UAH access to research grants, internships and instruments at federal laboratories, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory near Knoxville.

 

The agreement will help the university attract more and better students, Williams said. UAH now has 7,200 students, including undergraduates and graduates.

 

 

"ORNL is an enormous federal research center."

 

ORAU is composed of nearly 100 doctorate-granting universities and colleges across the U.S. Its mission is to foster scientific research and education through partnerships among academia, government and industry. Formed in 1946, the consortium is a nonprofit that operates as a contractor for the Department of Energy and has about $230 million in contracts annually.

 

Townsend said the program has enabled 500 students to conduct research in 150 facilities across the nation.

 

"It also helps nurture relationships between faculty and research scientists," he said.

 

Townsend said the consortium is particularly interested in working with UAH in projects involving high-performance computing, energy research, materials science and climatology, fields in which the university already conducts research.

 

"We want to leverage that research," he said.

 

Entry into the consortium will give UAH access to research instruments that would cost millions of dollars to obtain otherwise, Williams said.

 

"It saves us exorbitant amounts of money to get access to that infrastructure," he said.

 

Part of that infrastructure includes a Department of Energy supercomputer, now the world's fastest. The computer is capable of sustaining 50 trillion calculations per second.