Contact Sport
The Army’s chief scientist oversees a growing ‘ecosystem’ of university and industry research partnerships.
By Mark Matthews
When Thomas Russell joined the Pentagon’s vast science and technology complex as a chemist in 1990, he found an atmosphere far different from the close collaboration with universities and industry envisioned by Vannevar Bush, father of the post-World War II government research establishment. Where Bush had called for the “closest liaison” between military and civilian scientists and engineers, the armed services’ labs had grown insular. Barriers between Department of Defense researchers and their peers outside only stiffened as security tightened following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Tapped in 2013 to lead the Army Research Laboratory, Russell, 52, seized a chance to upend the status quo. Research is “a contact sport,” in his view, best conducted by scientists and engineers forming partnerships based on mutual interest and trust. His Open Campus (OC) initiative, begun in 2014 at ARL’s Adelphi, Md., headquarters, is designed to let such partnerships flourish as a science and technology “ecosystem,” with ARL’s 3,000 scientists and engineers working side by side with visiting researchers and, in turn, spending time on their campuses and in industry.
From the outset, OC was open to all nationalities, in a nod both to the globalization of research and to the high proportion of foreign-born science and engineering faculty members and international graduate students. Besides interdisciplinary collaborative opportunities and internships for their students, university researchers gain access to ARL laboratories, testing facilities, and ranges, which contain equipment many schools lack.
One thing they shouldn’t expect from ARL is money. It’s not a funding agency. Its staff members seek grants from the same agencies—including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Department of Energy—as do university researchers, although as a matter of policy they can’t apply as individuals to the National Science Foundation. Teamed with ARL scientists, however, university faculty could have a better shot at a grant. “It’s not about ARL’s money. It’s about other people’s money,” Philip Perconti, who heads ARL’s Sensors and Electron Devices Directorate, told an open-house audience last year.
Partnerships—either between individuals or between ARL and an institution—are formalized with a collaborative research-and-development agreement, or CRADA. Before OC, ARL had 14 CRADAs. Today it has at least 300, either signed or being processed, Russell says, noting that 60 percent are with academic institutions and the rest with industry. About a dozen CRADAs are with universities overseas, including the University of Budapest and Israel’s Ben-Gurion University. “We have a lot of collaborators from engineering groups,” Russell notes. (Engineers represent the largest proportion of Defense Department researchers.)
Perhaps a better measure of achievement are the research breakthroughs that, Russell says, would have taken a lot longer or never occurred without OC. One is a water-in-salt aqueous lithium ion battery developed by a team led by Kang Xu, an ARL senior research chemist, and Chunsheng Wang, a professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. The new battery is safer and greener than lithium ion batteries, the researchers say, and has the potential to improve both electric vehicles and provide large-scale storage of energy from intermittent sources, like solar and wind. “We had given up on water-based batteries,” Russell says, citing the work as an example of “reopening areas of engineering and science” to produce new discoveries.
Another sign of success is Russell’s transfer from Adelphi to the Pentagon, where he occupies a windowless office along the Pentagon’s E-ring as acting deputy assistant secretary of the Army for research and technology and Army chief scientist. Appointed in April, he now oversees triple the number of scientists and engineers at ARL—and a budget nearly 2.5 times as big.
Meanwhile, OC continues to flourish. The model is being adopted at ARL West, based at the University of Southern California, and at planned ARL branches in Chicago and Austin, Texas. Each will be a hub-and-spoke arrangement drawing in multiple regional schools.
Tapping industry seed money, ARL is currently a partner in 10 virtual research centers, each involving numerous institutions, enabling shared infrastructure and facilities. Universities “have a harder time working with each other than with us,” says Russell. “Once we get past the money and talk about a larger benefit, a light bulb goes off.”
Russell, who worked in Navy and Air Force research before joining ARL, sees interest in the OC concept among other services and overseas. He says OC has helped ARL avoid a recruitment crisis many feared would occur as baby boom researchers retire, and that interest among “very high quality” graduate students and postdocs “is just overwhelming.”
For recruits, the “opportunities are tremendous” in such promising fields as quantum research and synthetic biology, says Russell. He wants ARL’s basic-research collaborators to be thinking many years ahead, “beyond autonomous systems,” and hopes many remain in the ecosystem if they change jobs.
Mark Matthews is editor of Prism.
Image Courtesy of Thomas Russell/Thinkstock. Design by Nicola Nittoli.