Georgetown, Livermore Lab Sign New Agreement on Research, Teaching
Georgetown and the prestigious Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is enhancing a partnership that is likely to benefit research in Big Data, biosecurity, climate change, disaster management and other areas.
A NEW AGREEMENT BETWEENGeorgetown and the prestigiousLawrence Livermore National Laboratory(LLNL) is enhancing a partnership that is likely to benefit research in Big Data, biosecurity, climate change, disaster management and other areas.
The partnership began in 2009, spearheaded by Spiros Dimolitsas, the university’s senior vice president for research and chief technology officer at Georgetown who served as LLNL’s associate director for engineering between 1995 and 2001.
Georgetown and LLNL jointly launched a newExecutive Master’s of Professional Studies in Emergency and Disaster Managementat theSchool of Continuing Studiesin the fall of 2013 and have collaborated on a host of other projects.
SIGNIFICANT EXPANSION
“This is a very important next step in deepening the extraordinary partnership we’ve enjoyed with Livermore over the past five years,” Georgetown President John J. DeGioia says of the new agreement he signedFridaywith LLNL director Bill Goldstein. “It will allow us to strategically collaborate on research projects and programs designed to benefit our local, national and global communities.”
Provost Robert Groves says the new agreement provides a host of additional possibilities.
“Together we intend to seek new funding opportunities, and to establish and expand research and educational programs,” Groves says. “We also hope to create interdisciplinary research activity, exchange faculty, students and research staff, create scholarly products and host events for the purpose of advancing scientific and scholarly endeavors.
MEETING THE CHALLENGES
“This agreement advances and broadens the areas for cooperation between our two institutions,” says LLNL Director Bill Goldstein. “It helps bring together the policy, governmental and biomedical strengths of Georgetown with the science, computational and engineering strengths of Lawrence Livermore, to better meet the great challenges our nation faces in global security, health and education.”
TheMcCourt School of Public Policywill get involved in the partnership through itsMassive Data Institute, which will benefit from the collaboration of LLNL’s high-performance computing capabilities with the school’s eminent public policy scholars.
UNLIMITED COLLABORATION
The emergency management program isn’t the only product of the five-year partnership.
The university’sMaster of Science in BiotechnologyatGeorgetown University Medical Centersends its students to participate in LLNL’s Summer Internship Program annually. LLNL scientists also teach a course to GUMC graduate students via a distance learning platform.
“Our collaboration with Lawrence Livermore is limited only by our imaginations,” Dimolitsas says. “The partnership will allow us to accomplish things that neither of us could do alone.”