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Increasingly, students who
earn graduate degrees at MSU
are viewed as “economic engines,”
major contributors to this country’s
economic development—
some even before they enter the
workplace. Perhaps no one realizes
the importance of this more
than Satish Udpa, dean of MSU’s
College of Engineering.
“If we want to maintain our
market advantage, we have to
push for graduate education and
research, because that’s vital,”
says Udpa. “Economic development
in this country depends
very much on our ability to be
innovative and creative, and to
translate creative ideas into the
marketplace.”
Yet, at a time when the growth
of U.S. research activities and
graduate education is most
critical, federal and state resources
continue to diminish. It’s leading
to some troubling statistics.
Trouble on the
High-Tech Horizon
Michigan-based companies are
struggling to find skilled workers
to fill high-tech jobs due to the
shortage of domestic students
earning degrees in engineering
and technology fields.
In countries like Singapore,
China, Taiwan and South Korea,
the number of researchers has
grown at a much faster pace than
in the United States. Likewise,
the number of U.S. patents issued
this past year have been on a
downward trend. During the past
several years, high-technology
exports in the U.S. have steadily
dropped, while countries in the
Far East, the “tiger economies,”
have seen their high-tech export
figures continue to ramp up,
according to data in Science and
Engineering Indicators 2012, a
report published by the National
Science Foundation’s National
Science Board.
To turn these statistics around,
the U.S. must find ways to
increase the number of domestic
students who earn graduate
degrees here in the U.S., as well as
create jobs that will keep overseas
students here in this country after
they earn their degrees.
The number of students who
earn advanced degrees from MSU
has been on the rise since 2008. Approximately
2,500 students earned
advanced degrees from MSU in the
fiscal year 2010-2011. The College
of Engineering awards about 150
MS and PhD degrees each year.
“Basic and applied research are
both vital to keeping the economy
humming,” says Udpa. “And we
have a vested interest in keeping
this economy going, because we
want to maintain the kind of
lifestyle we’ve enjoyed for the past
60 years.”
In contrast to applied research,
which generally takes place in an
industry setting, basic research
takes place primarily in university
labs. That’s credited mainly to an
engineer named Vannevar Bush
(1890-1974), who earned his PhD
at MIT, became a faculty member
there, and ultimately became
MIT’s vice president and dean of
engineering. He was known for
his work on analog computing
and started the company that
eventually became Raytheon, one
of the top 50 companies in the
world today.
While serving as the head of
the Manhattan Project’s National
Defense Research Committee
(the Manhattan Project was a research
and development program
undertaken during World War II
to develop the first atomic bomb),
Bush discovered something. The
most creative phase in the lives of
most scientists spanned the 20-30
years of age period. Bush realized
that educational institutions
would be the best place to capture
the intellectual “hot spot” of these
young people.
“Bush suggested that perhaps
the most effective way to keep
the basic research enterprise at
“Graduate fellowships are a
cornerstone of strong research
programs and . . . allows us to
recruit the most capable.”
its best was to fund universities
to carry out basic research,” says
Udpa. Bush also helped create the
National Science Foundation in
1950 and authored a book titled
Science—The Endless Frontier.
“Bush is the father of numerous
things, and we don’t give him
enough credit,” says Udpa. “Because
of him, around the world,
U.S. universities are now held in
great regard; we are powerhouses
when it comes to research and
technology development.”
But the basic research carried
out at universities across the
country may not be of evident
use right away; its value may not
be realized for several years—or
several decades.
When electricity was discovered
in the 17th century, nobody
thought “it’s going to provide electricity
to power all our homes,” or
“it will power industry.” Likewise,
when quantum mechanics was discovered,
people didn’t realize the
impact it would have on semiconductor
design, LEDs and an entire
range of technologies. “Those
concepts, those investments that
we made a long time ago, are now
paying off,” Udpa points out.
Investing in
a Collaborative
Environment
A collaborative environment
is perhaps a university’s biggest
advantage when it comes to new
ideas and discoveries. Where else
would you find a concentration
of biologists, physicists, chemists,
engineers and business people, for
example, all in one location Furthermore,
who would ever think
that studying flies and crickets
could lead to the development of a
high-tech device to help the hearing
impaired But that’s exactly
what happened in one instance.
University biologists were
studying the Ormia ochracea, a
small, yellow nocturnal fly found
in the southwest that uses crickets
as a way to raise its young. The
fly deposits its larvae on a male
cricket, which it locates by listening
for the cricket’s chirp.
Research was carried out to
determine how the fly is capable
of locating the crickets, even
though its ears are spaced a miniscule
distance apart. Despite this
limitation, the fly can determine
the direction of sound source with
amazing precision.
“The tympanic membranes
of opposite ears are connected
mechanically, allowing localizing
acoustic sources with resolution of
less than two degrees (a 50-nanosecond
delay), using eardrums
separated by 0.5 mm,” Udpa
explains. Hearing about the biologists’
work, an engineer asked
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