THE UNIVERSITY RESEARCH CORRIDOR TOUR

By Joe Serwach
News Service

People know terms like Motown and the Motor City but they find there’s a lot they don’t know about Michigan when they tour the state’s University Research Corridor.

“You think you know Detroit but you really don’t,” TechTown entrepreneur Randal Charlton tells visitors after they’ve seen research in Ann Arbor, Detroit and East Lansing. “Business leaders who’ve spent their whole lives here aren’t aware of all the things that are happening here.”

Staffers for Michigan’s congressional delegation spent three days touring URC institutions to review how the universities are investing federal research support. Among the things they learned:

URC members Michigan State University, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University are investing more than $1 billion per year in research and development including efforts to fuel the development of rapidly growing industries like life sciences, energy, advanced manufacturing and information technology.

The U-M Health System plans to create 5,623 new full-time jobs between 2007 and 2012, and carry out more than $1 billion worth of new construction, which will create hundreds of temporary construction jobs each year between now and 2012. Wayne State is expanding its medical campus as well and MSU this year announced medical expansions into Grand Rapids, Detroit and Macomb County.

MSU just opened a $10 million alternative energy research center while Wayne State has attracted 28 businesses, as well as the headquarters of NextEnergy, to TechTown, the largest urban development park west of Singapore. U-M is investing more than $35 million per year on energy research and investing more than half a billion dollars in the new C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and Women’s Hospital.

“Michigan has a manufacturing base that understands high volume and quality from the factory floor to the Ph.D. level — most places on earth have one but they don’t have both,” said Joe Giachino, who left an industry job to be part of the Center for Wireless Integrated Microsystems, a partnership between U-M, MSU and Michigan Technological University developing micro-sensors that could do anything from monitoring bridge safety and air quality to the human body.

While most Michiganders know the state is losing manufacturing jobs and locked in a competition with Asian factories, few are as aware of the opportunities simultaneously occurring in Michigan’s knowledge economy, said Steve Forrest, U-M vice president for research.

The manufacturing economy accounts for 11 percent of national GDP and it’s shrinking while the knowledge economy accounts for 15 percent of GDP and it’s growing, Forrest said.

“Research dollars are not an entitlement, they’re a responsibility to the country,’’ Forrest said. “Let’s start with where we’re strong.’’

Among other ways the URC institutions are working together and reaching out across the state:

— URC education faculty helped develop new standardized tests and curricula that will give the state some of the nation’s highest education standard by 2011. Michigan this year became one of only three states in the nation requiring nearly all 11th graders to take the ACT, which boosted the number of students taking the test by more than 40 percent.

— Researchers from the three research universities have been collaborating with Henry Ford Health System since 2000 as part of the National Children’s Study, a massive federal effort to examine the effects of environmental influences on the health and development of more than 100,000 U.S. children, following them from before birth until age 21.

— MSU psychology researchers are working on a major study on the causes of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and collaborating with U-M and MSU researchers on related projects.

— MSU’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, the largest campus-based nuclear science facility in the country, is home to a major high tech manufacturing facility where workers manufacture sophisticated parts for cyclotron research that involves researchers from all three universities as well as researchers from 100 institutions around the world. More than two-thirds of the manufacturing work is farmed out to private machine shops across the state.

— Wayne’s School of Nursing is operating a high tech distance learning center that is able to help train nurses as far away as Grand Rapids, Saginaw and other parts of the state.

— U-M is home to the Solid State Electronics Laboratory and Michigan Nanofabrication Facility which are used by researchers from Wayne and MSU as well other universities and businesses from around the world to develop integrated circuits and micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) and microsystems. Researchers noted that a $2 million investment from the state in 1985, during another economic downturn helped the facility grow into a 24-7 operation that gets most of its support from user fees, leading to a new $100 million investment that will make the facility even more competitive.