Today Virginia Tech is the only university in Virginia ranked among the nation's top
50 research universities. Many of our faculty members have national and even international
reputations and our students are talented and motivated and we have a burning desire
to be even better. So today I propose that we accept the challenge
to place Virginia Tech in the top 30 research universities in America by the year 2010.
Just 10 years ago Virginia Tech established the goal of becoming one of the nation's
top 30 research institutions. Today that goal has been reached.
My brother went to school here 10 years ago, class of 2001, and things have really changed for the
better since then both in and out of class. It is not just that our civil engineering program is
one of the best programs in the world but we also have excellent mathematics and physics and
chemistry and business programs because today we have the space and the equipment I'm able to put
my students in my laboratory. Sometimes in the past we've had them in the hallways because
there was no space. It's great to have professors who are on the cutting edge of their profession.
My psych professor even let me help her with the project that she was doing
which gave me a publication to my credit as an undergrad. We've made tremendous progress
in recruiting a diverse student body.
domestically our diversity reflects the demography of our state and we're moving toward reflecting
the demography of the nation. There's more one-to-one contact with professors and graduate
students and undergraduate students all together. The NSF funding and the USDA funding has allowed
us to have very good graduate students, graduate assistants, that have worked on this project
as well as postdocs. We have achieved a number of doctoral programs in the humanities but
especially in the social sciences and I think the leading of those programs would have to be the
Virginia Center for Civil War Studies which was established in 1999. It is now the largest Civil
War center in the world. I came here as a grad student specifically to work with my advisor.
I mean, can you believe it, a Nobel prize winner? She's great. Obviously when you recruit outstanding young
faculty retention becomes an issue. Those folks are highly marketable and we've been able to retain
many of these young faculty because we've provided state-of-the-art equipment, the Commonwealth has
assisted us with bricks and mortar and we've also been able to recognize them through various reward mechanisms.
What's the biggest difference? The fine arts center, the performance hall,
university art gallery, all of the first class attractions we can now bring to this campus.
At the turn of the century ten years ago most research was being done inside the colleges and
individual departments. Now we have shed ourselves of these older disciplines in terms of thinking in
classic disciplines engineering chemistry and physics and now we think in terms of broader
concepts, bioinformatics, nanotechnology. And with the new research space consolidated sharing
facilities this has enabled those teams to come together from wherever they are on the campus to
form those multi-disciplinary groups that are so necessary for modern technological research.
About five years ago I was in this building and it was in my office and I just walked out and I happened
to run into someone who is in microbiology that I'd never met before and we started talking and
it turns out that the problem he's working on which is the rate of protein synthesis is closely
related to a fundamental issue that we have been interested in which has no applications whatsoever
until I met him. We now have a joint appointment program at the center where
faculty can hold an appointment at the Center for Gerontology and with their home discipline.
We no longer think of ourselves as an institution that works on its own. We've established strategic
partnerships with a number of federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation,
the National Institutes of Health and the new federal institute for information technology and
communications which was started in the year 2005. Today there are over 30 buildings that comprise
the Corporate Research Center. Not so long ago we achieved our goal of a million square feet
and employing over 3,000 people but the biggest change in the research park is the
greatly expanded role with international corporations. Many of these companies that now
exist in the Roanoke valley, here in Blacksburg and all along route 81 on the way down are really
part of our family. Even though the effect of the Virginia Tech Institute for Critical Technologies
in terms of increased prestige and income for the university has been great, the far larger
impact has been on the economic activities in this region and the state of Virginia.
A number of very exciting projects that were carried out initially have now resulted in
significant healthcare benefits for the future. Over the last eight years we've been able to
acquire specialized equipment so that we can actually take a look at bone health and
interactions with bone and exercise and nutrients and how those impact bone health
and prevent osteoporosis. Thanks in large measure to Virginia Tech's leadership we see Virginia as
the most sophisticated telecommunications state in the entire nation. As a result of some of the
technologies that we've developed and deployed at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute here
at Virginia Tech today plants serve as sentinels which means that they sense their environment and
then report through colors to satellite imagery systems whether they're thirsty
whether they're being attacked by a pathogen whether they're being attacked by an insect.
Research and outreach are partners in the university partners to help serve the state
and as we have attained our goal of top 30 research status we've also found that that
we have moved into top 30 outreach status. It's not a tri-part mission anymore it's a unified mission.
The international institute for information technology provides research education
professional education consulting entrepreneurism. We have established centers of learning
not only in Europe but in in Africa in Asia and Latin America. If we then
only think about our physical locations throughout all of those places where we
are literally dealing with 10,000 graduate students. That wouldn't tell the whole picture
because we have a virtual presence that again spans the globe in which we are educating in
one form or another for professional degrees master's degrees, for PhDs, as well as special
certificates and executive training. We are dealing with over 25,000 graduate students worldwide.
In the past Virginia Tech was looked at as a rural university and now we have proven
that location doesn't matter. By the year 2010 today Virginia Tech will be one of the leading
research institutions in the world in biomedical and medical research. I could say I've been around
this campus a long time and I've seen a number of changes but I think what's happened in the
last 10 years has really been one of the most exciting times of my entire career.
Virginia Tech is the top choice for all the students in my high school and some of the
schools that my brother applied to 10 years ago aren't even considered now. Yeah I'm still
announcing the pre-game and halftime and I tell you it's been exciting two national championships
the last two years who'da thought it 10 years ago. The campus is bursting with new ideas revitalized
ambitions. It's been an amazing 10 years. Over the last decade we transformed Virginia Tech into
really a top producer in the world attracting the top students and faculty from all over the planet
here to Blacksburg it's been a wild ride and a terrific ride I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.