The Lab of the South

South East States.

"I look at it as the little 'r,' the regular-sized 'R' and the bigger 'R,'" says Tom Ballard, director of economic development and partnerships in ORNL's Technology Transfer and Economic Development office. The "R"—which stands for "region"—begins with East Tennessee, expands to the rest of the state and, finally, embraces the South as a whole, he says, including 13 states.

To that end, ORNL has partnered with local, state and regional research and economic development organizations including Technology 2020 in Oak Ridge; Jobs Now!, a multi-county East Tennessee job creation effort; the University of Memphis FedEx Institute of Technology; the Mississippi Technology Alliance; and the Southern Growth Policies Board, an organization representing 13 states.This "Lab of the South" initiative, Ballard says, endeavors to create partnerships throughout the region that enable companies, universities and others interested in research to take advantage of ORNL's capabilities in ways that build a technology-based economy and, through these arrangements, create local support that helps attract new research programs, and dollars, to the Laboratory.

Examples of regional efforts now in the works include:

The Southern Automotive R&D Initiative:
ORNL's collaboration with university R&D centers in southern states that are home to major automakers—Saturn and Nissan in Tennessee, BMW in South Carolina, Toyota in Kentucky and Mercedes Benz in Alabama, for example—to build a consortium specializing in automotive research that would mirror similar capabilities at the University of Michigan.

Southern Homeland Security Initiative:
An effort to use the South as a test bed and commercialization center for new homeland security technologies.

Southern Information Technology Initiative:
A linkage of universities throughout the South to ORNL's National Leadership Computing Facility.

Southern Nanotechnology Network:
A regional effort to create a nanotechnology "hot spot" utilizing new neutron scattering and neutron science capabilities at ORNL.

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