Brookhaven National Laboratory Delegation Visits New York Tech

Pictured: A delegation of leadership from Brookhaven National Laboratory visited New York Tech’s Long Island campus, where they met with faculty and staff from the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences and other university departments.

A delegation from Long Island’s esteemed Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) visited New York Tech’s Long Island campus recently to continue a dialogue that began in June when leaders of the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences were invited to visit BNL. The visits are part of an effort to identify potential collaborations between the two institutions.

With shared research interests like energy science, nanomaterials, data science, particle physics, and quantum information science—and a common goal of building a pipeline for future generations of scientists and engineers—collaboration between the two organizations could potentially yield many positive results.

The BNL delegation met with faculty and staff in the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences and staff from departments including Career Success and Experiential Education, visited labs and attended brief presentations by faculty researchers on both New York campuses, and toured the Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation Center (ETIC), where ETIC student employees demonstrated current projects, including prototypes being developed for NASA. Later in the visit, the delegation met with President Hank Foley, Ph.D., Provost and Executive Vice President Jerry Balentine, D.O., and Vice Provost for Research Jared Littman, Ph.D. 

ETIC student employee and mechanical engineering student Lincoln Dover (left) shows off an ETIC robotics project to BNL’s Ken White, manager of the Office of Educational Programs, and Aleida Perez, manager of University Relations and Department of Energy programs for the Office of Educational Programs.

According to Dean Babak Beheshti, Ph.D., the BNL delegation visit provided a significant opportunity to showcase the capabilities of the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences and beyond, while highlighting the university’s trajectory to achieve R2 status as a doctoral university with high research activity. Faculty research collaboration, co-op and internship positions for New York Tech students, and technology transfer are among the opportunities between the laboratory and university that Beheshti, Xun Yu, Ph.D., professor and chair of mechanical engineering, and others at New York Tech are seeking to develop.

As part of the visit, BNL delegates offered an overview of their ongoing environment and climate science work, educational programs available on the lab’s eastern Long Island campus in Upton, N.Y., and engineering opportunities at the National Synchrotron Light Source II—a medium-energy electron storage ring that can generate ultrabright light beams ranging from infrared to X-ray.

Visiting from the laboratory were John Hill, deputy director for science and technology; David Manning, director of the Stakeholder Relations Office; Erick Hunt, director of the Office of Research Partnerships and Technology Transfer; Ken White, manager of the Office of Educational Programs; Ian Ballantyne, chief information security officer for cybersecurity in the Information Technology Division; Aleida Perez, manager of University Relations and Department of Energy Programs for the Office of Educational Programs; and Kristyn Noren, senior protocol officer.

Primarily supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Brookhaven National Laboratory is home to seven Nobel Prize-winning discoveries and more than 70 years of transformative science and technology solutions addressing energy, environmental, and nuclear challenges.