Sandia National Labs Academic Programs Collaboration Report

Shaping technical partnership direction through Sandia Day

On March 30-31, the UT Austin Office of the Vice President for Research hosted “ Sandia Day at UT Austin” to explore strategic opportunities for partnership growth. The event brought together more than 115 UT and Sandia participants including leadership, researchers, faculty, staff, and students. Sandia Day kicked off with campus tours of UT’s Robotics Lab, TX Advanced Computing Center Visualization Lab, and the Jackson School of Geosciences’ Methane Hydrates and Pressure Core Center Lab. During a leadership session, key UT Austin and Sandia stakeholders reviewed and recommited to ongoing collaborations and future UT-Sandia partnership objectives via a strategic objectives discussion. Justine Johannes, Sandia Associate Labs Director for Global Security and UT Austin Executive Champion, provided a partnership update reviewing the successes such as talent pipeline, joint research, and the 37 currently Sandia-funded projects totaling more than $3.8M. Other key successes were presented and discussed as models for a UT-Sandia research pipeline from LDRD to joint external funding wins: COINFLIPS, Autonomy for Hypersonics (A4H) and other hypersonics successes, and a grid resilience project led by Sandia PI Manuel Garcia. Discussions focused on pursuing larger funding opportunities such as Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act (Microelectronics), Hydrogen Hubs, Energy-/ Climate-related calls and big ideas, such as UT’s Permian Basin Development Lab (PEDL). The concluding activities included briefings about recent joint UT-Sandia successes with the idea to replicate these successes:

• Sandia’s Autonomy for Hypersonics’ (A4H) Mission Campaign projects Sandia’s Patrick Blonigan presented the UT Austin-Sandia successes on A4H, which led to the development of a strong UT Austin-Sandia partnership in hypersonics, including partnering on a NASA awarded 3-year project, “Full Airframe Sensing Technology (FAST),” led by UT Austin’s Noel Clemens, Jayant Sirohi, and Karen Wilcox for $3.3M. • CO-designed Improved Neural Foundations Leveraging Inherent Physics Stochasticity (COINFLIPS) UT Austin’s Jean Anne Incorvia and Sandia’s Brad Aimone presented about the COINFLIPS 3-year project, which was funded through an award by DOE Office of Science for $6M. • Improving Energy Grid Resilience UT Austin’s Surya Santoso and Sandia’s Manuel Garcia presented about the successful

collaborations in improving energy grid resilience with two projects: “Critical Node Identification and Modeling” funded by the

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2021-2022 Collaboration Report