Thwarting the terrorist threat

(Continued from front page)

Research at Northeastern University

CenSSIS was founded in 2000 as a National Science Foundation-funded interdisciplinary engineering research center, with a mission to revolutionize the existing technology for detecting and imaging biomedical, environmental or geophysical objects that lie underground or underwater, or are embedded in the human body.

Its academic partners include Northeastern University, Boston University, Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez.

The center currently has an annual operating budget of about $8 million, with more than 40 faculty members and 200 students engaged in research efforts. Its industry partners include Raytheon, Analogic, Textron, Lockheed-Martin, Cardiomag Imaging, Mercury, Transtech, GSSI, and Siemens.

Seed investments and support from MTC’s John Adams Innovation Institute to further university/industry collaboration have played a critical role in the success of CenSSIS, according to the center’s director, Dr. Michael Silevitch, Robert D. Black Professor of Engineering at Northeastern University

“Money and support from the Innovation Institute were absolutely critical to facilitating the industry partnerships,” Silevitch told Convergence in a recent interview. Further, Silevitch said, the money enabled the center to lay the groundwork for a second homeland security project – the detection of suicide bombers at a distance. “We are currently in final negotiations for Phase I of a $1.7 million contact with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” he said. The industry partners in this project include Raytheon, Siemens, and Acentech, a firm based in Cambridge.

Silevitch said he had been turned down twice in his attempts to set up a research center at Northeastern University before succeeding in the difficult world of winning competitive federal research dollars. To succeed, Silevitch said he had to redefine the word “subsurface” as “something hidden from vision.” He also had to invent a new concept, Solutionware, different from either software or hardware. “Solutionware is the integration of tools and technology that allow you to solve diverse problems with similar solutions,” he explained.

Michael A. Sharp, Program Director, Advanced Spectroscopic Portal at Raytheon in Andover, Massachusetts, told The Boston Globe that the partnership with Bubble Technology, a 50-person commercial spinoff in working in partnership with CenSSIS, represented a new model that could help Raytheon grow its business. Sharp called it a strategy of forging alliances with smaller and more nimble technology companies.

Robert G. Kispert, Director of Federal and University Programs at the Innovation Institute, said that CenSSIS requested funding to support the follow-up to a turnkey R&D project involving homeland security. “We invested $150,000 in an R&D collaborative development grant from the Massachusetts Research Center Matching Fund to prime the pump,” he said. “The understanding was that if we put up the money, they would develop the business, and the business would become a self-sustaining proposition.” Indeed, the development grant has helped to leverage two federal contracts worth with enormous economic potential for Massachusetts.

The best measure of the research center’s success, however, may be the recent gift of $20 million from The Gordon Foundation, the largest single donation ever received by Northeastern University, to support the work of CenSSIS, recognizing its success in creating a new model of collaboration between academia, industry and government.

The gift will enable CenSSIS to evolve from an academic research center into a R&D center focused on converting research into new products for commercial and governmental markets. The engineering research center will be renamed the Bernard M. Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems, in honor of Analogic founder and chairman Bernard Gordon, a 1986 National Medal of Technology recipient. 

“The Bernard M. Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems promises to become a national model for the fusion of academic research and private-sector collaboration,” said Silevitch.. “It will lead to technology transfer and spur economic development in Massachusetts and beyond.”

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Robert G. Kispert, Director of Federal and University Programs at the Innovation Institute, said that CenSSIS requested funding to support the follow-up to a turnkey R&D project involving homeland security. “We invested $150,000 in an R&D collaborative development grant from the Massachusetts Research Center Matching Fund to prime the pump,” he said. “The understanding was that if we put up the money, they would develop the business, and the business would become a self-sustaining proposition.” Indeed, the development grant has helped to leverage two federal contracts worth with enormous economic potential for Massachusetts.