Engineering Institute
Collaboration for conducting mission-driven, multidisciplinary engineering research and recruiting, revitalization, and retention of current & future staff
The Engineering Institute is a collaboration between LANL and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) Jacobs School of Engineering, whose mission is to develop a comprehensive approach for
- conducting mission-driven, multidisciplinary engineering research and
- recruiting, revitalization, and retention of the current and future staff necessary to support LANL’s stockpile stewardship responsibilities.
The components of the Engineering Institute are:
- Los Alamos Dynamic Summer School (LADSS)
- joint LANL/UCSD degree program with a unique focus in validated simulations, structural health monitoring, and damage prognosis
- joint LANL/UCSD research projects
- industry short courses
- annual workshop
The LADSS addresses recruiting entry-level students into the program from across the country.
The joint degree program addresses training of potential new hires and early-career staff, while also serving to retain mid-career staff who act as instructors and advisors for the early-career staff.
In addition to meeting mission-driven research needs, the joint research projects also serve as a retention tool for staff at all career levels that collaborate with the UCSD faculty and students on these projects. The new technology development associated with these projects inherently provides the added benefit of a recruiting tool.
Industry short courses provide an avenue of outreach to the engineering community at large, as well as an additional, nontraditional form of peer review.
Technical thrust
The technology thrust of the Engineering Institute is the development and integration of the three following fundamental engineering technology areas:
- advanced sensing and telemetry hardware
- novel signal processing and pattern recognition algorithms
- complex multi-scale, physics-based predictive modeling