Editorial: Partnership promising for UNM, Sandia, N.M.

For years the University of New Mexico has struggled to figure out what it wants to be — a college experience for all comers or a top-tier flagship research university.

And for years the nation’s national laboratories have struggled to expand their relevancy in a post-Cold War world.

But a strong and promising vision is emerging.

Fresh on the heels of a partnership announcement involving the university and the city of Albuquerque to bring research innovations to market comes the possibility of a similar partnership involving UNM and Sandia National Laboratories.

The National Nuclear Security Administration has said it plans to put a new Sandia contract out to bid, and UNM president Bob Frank says “we’d like to see ourselves as a significant collaborator with the contractor that wins the award.” He says the university has met with all of the private companies that have expressed interest in partnering with UNM.

That collaboration could help fix a system that venture capitalists say makes it difficult at best to pull amazing innovations out of high-secrecy nuclear weapons labs and bring those technologies to market.

There is a track record for that kind of sharing and that kind of tech transfer. The University of Tennessee and Battelle Memorial Institute manage Oak Ridge National Laboratory via a limited liability partnership. IX Power is now marketing water-purification technology from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Both LANL and Sandia have launched new programs and initiatives to accelerate technology transfer, encouraged by the Obama administration and the DOE to work more closely with the private sector. And Sandia chief Paul Hommert was named 2013 Laboratory Director of the Year by the Federal Laboratory Consortium for his efforts to reinvigorate technology transfer programs early and often.

But more can and must be done on the technology transfer front, and UNM is fully capable of being a university partner that can help make that happen.

While it would mean more faculty and students working at the lab in the short term, Frank says the goal in the long term is the commercialization of technologies developed at the lab as well as start-up companies. “We help the lab, the university and the community grow these products in a way that we haven’t done in the past, and we see this as a win for all of us,” he says.

Like the UNM-city collaboration, linking the expertise of the state’s flagship research university with the business acumen of a private contractor and the technological innovations developed at Sandia is a game-changing proposal that positions the local and state economies for job and business growth.

It’s a concept that deserves serious consideration, and Frank deserves credit for moving it forward.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.