Industry-inspired research, research-inspired education

Friday, August 26, 2022

Dedicated students, distinguished colleagues and dear friends,

Happy Friday!

American research universities conduct research to advance fundamental science, applied science, new process concepts and product development. Industry (companies) will then use the research discoveries to develop processes and components, integrate systems, and perform functional tests to create products. The process therefore spans the bandwidth from fundamental science to final product development, at times including a series of somewhat contentious negotiation over intellectual property ownership and licensing terms.

Here at S&T an optimized, inclusive approach of integrating domain-knowledgeable industry partners and subject matter faculty experts has created environments of long and strong collaboration. This approach has resulted in successful industry-inspired research and research-inspired education. One very successful model has been our university/industry consortia, including:

Each of these entities provides valuable service to their industry partners by providing exceptional research that has applied outcomes. Consider the Electromagnetic Compatibility Laboratory,  headed by Dr. Daryl Beetner, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Together with its industry consortium partners, students and alumni, the EMC members swept all eight paper awards, with every EMC lab faculty member involved in at least one of the eight, at the world’s foremost EMC conference: the 2022 IEEE EMC+SIPI Symposium. The competition? University of Illinois, Stanford, Georgia Tech and many top-ranked international universities.

The list of awards is long and includes the EMC Society President’s Memorial Award for outstanding EMC student, the Richard R. Stoddart Award for Outstanding Performance, the IEEE Fellow Award and one in particular, the Hall of Fame Award, that was bestowed upon Dr. Tom Van Doren, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and a founding member of EMC.

The proven approaches of these consortia serve as a blueprint for our latest partnership, the Manufacture Missouri Ecosystem. The MME will bring manufacturers across Missouri together with researchers from S&T and our university partners to equip companies with the research, tools, training and technology they need to succeed in the highly competitive global manufacturing landscape.

Through such close collaborations, our centers have catalyzed breakthroughs by creating and maintaining engagement between industry practitioners and our faculty and student innovators. The result has been threefold: conducting research to address critical industry challenges; identifying, training and mentoring highly skilled STEM innovation leaders; and enhancing regional, national and global competitiveness in emerging technology fields.

Today, our partnership with industry is self-igniting and always evolving. As we engage with our partners more broadly, we appreciate how far we have come in performing industry-inspired research and offering research-inspired education.

Warmly,

-Mo.

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Mohammad Dehghani, PhD
Chancellor
mo@mst.edu | 573-341-4116

206 Parker Hall, 300 West 13th Street, Rolla, MO 65409-0910
chancellor.mst.edu