UIUC-Sandia partnership: watching an orchard bear fruit

Led by Campus Executive Rodney Wilson and Deputy Campus Executive and recruiting team lead, Russ Skocypec, the theory by which this partnership flourishes is, according to Skocypec, “all about relationships.”

This is not simply a hypothesis, but deserves the status of theory given the testing it has withstood over an almost 15-year tenure. With over 200 Illinois alumni already employed by Sandia, ten additional full-time UIUC new hires joined the Laboratories--five of them PhDs--in FY 2009, alone. More than simply a one-way flow stream from Illinois to New Mexico or California, the partnership is entirely reciprocated, as Sandia seeks collaborative research endeavors with virtually any UIUC research arena that coincides with mission priorities. Key thrust areas are identified, then reviewed and assessed at an annual Sandia-UIUC board meeting. Building upon longstanding collaborations in materials science and modeling and simulation, recent important areas of collaboration include cognitive neuroscience, nuclear engineering, complex systems and system of systems, and nanoscience (UIUC is a partner in the Sandialed National Institute for Nanoengineering [NINE]).

“Sandia doesn’t give money away,” emphasizes Campus Executive, Rodney Wilson, the comment meant to indicate that the partnership is built around common research interests that benefit both institutions. A 2007 memorandum of understanding (MOU) was signed to streamline the collaborative process, ensure that worthy scientific collaborations do not drown in a sea of red tape.

According to Wilson, this MOU “elevates the relationship to pay close attention to research areas in which both institutions have interest. Our job, then, is to get someone involved from each side.” Once that is accomplished, subsequent steps in actually establishing a joint research program are much easier. In a partnership of this type, mutually beneficial research endeavors can be greatly facilitated by shorter- or longer-term exchanges of early-career personnel. With Sandia staff members and Illinois faculty the bridge across which collaborative ideas and exchanges of research results ensue, graduate students and postdoctoral students can represent equally important traffic across that bridge, adding a creative human component to the research, making it more likely that important outcomes are more thoroughly and fruitfully shared.

For example, working as a Summer 2009 intern in the laboratory of Sandian John Eddy, current campus executive graduate research student Conrad Tucker made significant contributions to the Sandia group’s system of systems analysis, helping to strengthen the partnership in this area. In turn, Eddy traveled to UIUC in the Spring of 2010 to present a seminar on this work at the leading edge of computational systems analysis. On the one hand, Tucker helped Sandia in its effort to discern patterns and discover behaviors that it is attempting to mitigate in military systems in order to better predict failure rates. On the other, Tucker brought back his “better grounded” experience to the laboratory of Professor Harrison Kim (IESE at Illinois) with real-world, national security applications that brought into focus the importance of the research.

Moreover, Tucker’s enthusiasm about his Sandia summer will undoubtedly spread virally through the ranks of his colleagues, both in his own laboratory and others. As pointed out by Wilson and Skocypec, this one-on-one contact and its infectious propagation serves as an eye-opener for other graduate students at the university, informing them of the availability and the educational and career value of a Sandia internship. Such is the type of pipeline that ultimately makes it possible for Sandia to attract significant numbers of talented staff from UIUC.

Exemplary is Sandia staff member, Laura Matzen, hired in the important national security area of human cognition analysis, where modelers and psychometricists are making inroads into a relatively young field that is attempting to employ a number of different brain-imaging and computational techniques to categorize, predict, and quantify threats to national security from individuals and groups across the globe. By deducing, for example, patterns in speech and written texts that can assist intelligence analysts to identify threats of various types, this interface of cognitive neuroscience and computer science is clearly serving the Laboratories’ national security mandate.

A chemistry major as an undergrad, who had worked several summers at Sandia, Matzen changed her graduate school area of interest to cognitive science, and through contact with the UIUC recruiting team, discovered the campus executive graduate research program. Despite the fact that it was an engineering call, Laura applied, and her successful application provided her support for three years of her doctoral program, working with Sandian Travis Bauer on human speech. In addition, the intellectual freedom conferred by the support enabled Laura to significantly expand her horizons, and her doctoral thesis included work from the laboratories of three different faculty members at UIUC.

“I got to do lots of exploration,” she says of what she clearly views as a completely enriching experience. Laura had always pictured herself as an academic, a professor at a major research university, like UIUC, and this image persisted through her first three years of graduate school. But gradually, as she communicated with Bauer and other Sandians, and observed some of the situations surrounding her, she recognized several factors that moved her toward a career as a Sandia staff member. She attended several dinners given by the Illinois recruiting team; “I knew the purpose was recruiting,” she observes, but despite that realization, she initially clung to her academic aspirations until she weighed all factors. The growth in Sandia cognitive science research, particularly its collaboration with UIUC, was a motivator, as was her desire to focus her energies on research, rather than teaching and other aspects of an academic career.

Her decision has been quite satisfying. She is principal investigator (PI) on an LDRD project, which will bring an electroencephalography (EEG) capability to Sandia, closely working with Illinois faculty member Kara Federmeier, in a study of the brain’s hippocampus and memory formation and a new phenomenon in the EEG of patients that may potentially be predictive of ways to improve memory.

“This is exciting, really promising,” Laura says. A new collaborative project with Laura as Sandia lead is just beginning with noted UIUC faculty member, Neil Cohen, and graduate research program student participant, Patrick Watson. These collaborations bring Sandia even closer to UIUC’s Beckman’s Institute, playing into strengths from both institutions, according to Rodney Wilson. Beckman is a highly multidisciplinary institute whose purpose is to collaboratively link researchers spanning the natural and the social sciences. It is an immense and self-funded (through an endowment from Arnold and Mabel Beckman and the State of Illinois) undertaking.

Its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) now offers a new supercomputer named “Blue Waters,” which is poised as a petaflop (a quadrillion or 1015 computational operations per second) machine. A recent MOU with Sandia’s Org. 1400, Computation, Computers and Math, focuses on the next-stage progression to exascale computing (a quintillion or 1018 operations per second). Wilson points out that Sandia’s codes and its vast modeling capabilities will be of great value to the Beckman Institute’s powerful new hardware, and there is a planned collaboration around a cyber defender program to enhance cyber security, protect cyber resources, and safeguard data.

Several central research themes at the Beckman Institute are resonant with current Sandia growth initiatives such as biomedical imaging and infectious disease diagnostics. Beckman’s incredibly diverse and integrated multidisciplinary environment mirrors some key elements of Sandia’s own multidisciplinarity, and in that sense, there is a natural synergy between the research environments.

“There are just so many strong alliances,” as Skocypec frames it. “A national security laboratory is about multidisciplinary teamwork. We need future Sandians comfortable in multiple domains,” he adds, offering a reason for his enthusiasm about the success of the UIUC/Beckman recruiting effort. This effort is so well organized that the recruiting team with the yeoman efforts of Staci Dorsey, who provides assistance to the UIUC campus executive effort, has set up a SharePoint site, which helps coordinate and track the recruiting. By posting Sandia job openings, the site helps guide recruiters to search the UIUC landscape for students who might fit a given position and assists recruiters in promoting specific careers at Sandia.

Recruiters are also Sandia technical staff members, and to enhance this search for talent, recruiters are encouraged to give formal or informal “tech talks” when they visit the university, bringing their own work alive in meetings with students and postdocs; this continues to strengthen the partnership in myriad ways. The pragmatism of the recruiting effort is likewise reflected in the fact that recruiters of different ages are often paired, so that the younger recruiter of a pair will be able to help younger UIUC staff candidates with more mundane but sometimes daunting issues, such as housing, particularly for someone considering relocation from the Midwest to Albuquerque.

In Conrad Tucker’s case, this outreach even extended to the issue of ethnicity, as the recruiting team introduced him to members of the African-American community in the city. A “self-generated network” is the way Skocypec characterizes the current situation, which generated 90 résumés and 50 potential hires in FY 2009.

“We plant the seed . . . or the sapling . . . and then step out of the way,” he modestly proffers. And while this may, to some extent, be true, it is also obvious that years of tilling and fertilization have occurred to create a model for what a win-win university partnership should look like.
___________________

Reprinted by permission from Sandia National Laboratories University Partnerships Annual Report 2009 (SAND 2010-3766P).

*Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.