IN THE NEWS
NC State engineering continues to draw attention from well-known national and international media.
In April, for example, the Economist featured the role of the Golden LEAF Biomanufacturing Training and Education Center (BTEC) in North Carolina’s burgeoning biotechnology sector. The London-based magazine is one of the world’s leading news and business publications.
The story noted that North Carolina has invested more than $1.2 billion in biotechnology over the past 10 years for facilities, research, training programs and incentives for companies. A big part of that is BTEC, housed in a new building on Centennial Campus that is the largest facility of its kind in the nation. The story mentioned North Carolina’s role in reaching out to industry and training biomanufacturing workers, adding that BTEC was an even “more elaborate example of college-state-industry interaction.”
BTEC’s building was paid for from the state’s 1998 settlement with tobacco companies, the story notes, and its operating costs are covered by the state. The center trains as many as 2,000 people each year for biomanufacturing jobs.
“We look at ourselves, and I think the state does too, as an economic-development tool,” Rick Lawless, the associate director of the center, told the magazine.
Also getting media attention is the NSF FREEDM Systems Center, formed in 2008 by an $18.5 million Engineering Research Center grant from the National Science Foundation.
The center, also headquartered on Centennial Campus, is finding new ways to build an “Energy Internet” that speeds renewable energy via smart grid into millions of homes and businesses. When veteran Associated Press energy writer H. Josef Hebert was looking for experts to describe the meters that will monitor energy use on the smart grid, he asked Dr. Alex Huang, the center’s director.
“The meter is only the beginning,” Huang told him. Huang went on to say that instead of power flowing from a small number of power plants, the smart grid can usher in a system of distributed energy so electricity “will flow from homes and businesses into the grid, neighborhoods will use local power and not just power flowing from a single source.”
The story was picked up by newspapers and websites all over the country,
including USA Today, MSNBC, Forbes and the Boston Globe. 