Making sure those systems engineers who can make the Apache, and all the other army helicopters stay the best in the world is a job that UAH is about to take on. Under the auspices of the Army Aviation and Missile Research Development Engineering Center at Redstone Arsenal, and the Program Executive Office for Army Aviation, which also on the base, UAH is starting a new engineering program.
It's a Master's of Science in Engineering with a concentration on Rotorcraft Systems Engineering. The new concentration will make UAH one of just two centers of Rotorcraft excellence in the south. Dr. James Snider is the director of the UAH center, and he is excited. "It's a big deal, this area has become the home of army aviation. We have the Aviation Missile command, the PEO for aviation. Fort Rucker is the home of the War Fighter Center. So this is a natural for this area. Alabama is the home of army aviation, so UAH has to be the intellectual base for that home," says Dr. Snider.
The Rotorcraft Center is recruiting students for the new program, and expects to begin work in May. The students will have their graduate efforts fully funded by the army, but they'll have to pay that back. For every month a student is in the program at UAH, they owe the army three months. That will likely mean each student will be working at Redstone for three years. Of course those will be engineering jobs that pay well.
It would appear to be a win, win situation. Students get a graduate degree, and a guaranteed job. The army gets new talent in a very important field. American soldiers get the best helicopters in the world. [End]
Sure, Richard Lerner aced chemistry. But he also was a state champion wrestler at Hirsch High School and during the summers made more than one dramatic rescue while patrolling a downtown Lake Michigan beach as a captain of the lifeguards.
He had brains, muscles and a prankster's sense of humor. He once stuffed the Thanksgiving turkey with BBs from his Daisy air rifle.
"I guess I always was a little different," said Lerner, president of The Scripps Research Institute, which plans to open a Palm Beach County, Fla., biomedical laboratory in what is the center's first expansion outside of California in its 42-year history.
Indeed, at 65, Lerner is a unique figure in American science, a prize-winning chemist with an antic wit and the business acumen of an entrepreneur.
By dint of personality and will, over the past 15 years he has turned San Diego-based Scripps into the largest private research center in the United States, assembled an illustrious faculty of more than 1,000 Ph.D. biologists and chemists, and pioneered an era of unprecedented - and often controversial - partnerships with drug companies to fuel discoveries.
"He has a remarkable talent for bringing people, ideas and concepts together to make things happen," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dr. Phillip A. Sharp, awarded a 1993 Nobel Prize in medicine. "I don't know of another leader who has shown the creativity and energy Richard has."
Competitive and ambitious, Lerner also has what Sharp called "an emotional need to stand at the top. It's a hunger."
That hunger - and the lure of $569 million - brought Lerner and Scripps to South Florida. In exchange for the taxpayers' largesse, Lerner has agreed to replicate Scripps in the middle of a wetland in hopes of touching off a sprawling biotech community that could generate thousands of high-paying jobs.***