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Education Opportunities
Partnering with higher education for the future of LANL, fostering relationships that attract students, educators, and potential research and commercial partners.
- Engineering Institute»
- Institute for Advanced Studies»
- Materials Design Institute»
- Information Science & Technology Institute»
- Institute for Multiscale Materials Studies»
Extensive, beneficial collaborations support educational experiences
As of 2011, LANL had 375 subcontracts that totaled $80.9 million in universities across 41 states. Our agreements with University of California and New Mexico universities represent a sizable portion of those subcontracts because of our Education Institute Partnerships.
The Education Institutes maintain a focus on university interactions, primarily with University of California campuses. These include
- Engineering Institute, in conjunction with the University of California (UC), San Diego
- Information Science and Technology Institute, in conjunction with UC, Santa Cruz
- Materials Design Institute, in conjunction with UC, Davis
- Institute for Multiscale Materials Studies, in conjunction with UC, Santa Barbara
- Institute for Advanced Studies, in conjunction with the New Mexico Consortium (University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University, and New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology)
Distance learning
The National Security Education Center is a hub to students, visiting professors from around the world, and LANL technical staff, who participate in distance-learning classes and engage in exciting projects on everything from the structural health of wind-turbine blades to new computer architectures for handling gigantic data sets.
Three mission incubator centers further support collaborations
There are three mission incubator centers at Los Alamos: the Center for Bio-Security Science, the Energy Security Center, and the Information Science and Technology Center. These incubator centers work with LANL's line organizations and program development and research efforts, foster science and technology for programs, and enhance national recognition of LANL capabilities and programs.
Focus areas of incubator centers:
- Center for Bio-Security Science works to achieve science and technology breakthroughs in understanding and mitigating threats to national security, public health, and agriculture from natural, emerging, and engineered infectious agents
- Energy Security Center works to develop new ideas for reliable, secure, and sustainable carbon neutral energy solutions for the nation
- Information Science and Technology Center strives to enhance LANL’s capabilities in scientific information science and technology to address LANL, DOE, and national information, science, and technology needs
Key working relationships with major universities
In addition to the institutes and centers, LANL worked diligently and methodically over the last six years to build, maintain, and enhance essential relationships with major universities.
- Under the auspices of DOE’s National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts, LANL is part of a consortium of more than three dozen university and industry partners engaged in developing economically viable and environmentally sustainable methods to produce algal biofuels. Algae extraction technology is based on LANL’s R&D 100 award-winning Ultrasonic Algal Biofuel Harvester.
- LANL is part of DOE’s National Advanced Biofuels Consortium, which includes 17 partners from industry, universities, and national laboratories. The goal of the consortium is to develop infrastructure-compatible, biomass-based hydrocarbon fuels. LANL is developing catalysts to degrade biomass into usable fuels.
- LANL, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory collaborated on a new computer model of the Earth’s magnetosphere
- LANL and Duke University have partnered in designing early-phase safety trials to assess a LANL-designed HIV mosaic vaccine for humans
- LANL and the University of New Mexico began working on a new project to develop early detection for contaminants in the beef-production environment