Sandia National Labs NM Partnerships Collaboration Report 2021-2022

About Sandia’s National/Regional University Partnerships Network

After almost 2 years of careful consideration and planning, Sandia implemented the new Sandia University Partnerships Network (SUPN). The new SUPN strategy reinforces Sandia’s intention to partner broadly with universities based on merit while ensuring diversity in both the talent pipeline and research collaborations. It also reaffirms Sandia’s commitment to cultivate enduring strategic and mutually beneficial relationships with a focused set of schools and to invest corporate resources at a level commensurate with the partnership impact. The SUPN National/Regional Partners category includes 20 schools across the country representing various areas of expertise complementary to that of Sandia. Universities designated as Sandia’s National/Regional Partners are essential for recruiting and successful research & development collaborations. Half of these academic partners are minority-serving institutions, and five of them are part of Sandia’s Securing Top Academic Research Talent (START) at Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCU) Program. Each school in the National/ Regional Partnership helps Sandia execute top research and facilitate diversity goals. Through these partnerships, Sandia will accelerate technology transfer, increase the potential for partnership impact, provide joint

funding for strategic seed research, and enable opportunities for advisory board memberships, sabbaticals, and exchange of staff, faculty, students, and postdoctoral students.

“Through these partnerships, Sandia will accelerate technology transfer...”

SUPN also strives to establish and sustain strategic research partnerships by establishing several federally sponsored collaborations and multi-institutional consortiums in science and technology priorities such as autonomy, advanced computing, hypersonics, quantum information science, and data science. Speaking of SUPN, Academic Programs senior manager Diane Peebles said, “We have created dedicated teams for each of our network partner universities who are committed to facilitating the relationship, including a Sandia Campus Executive to provide a connection with Sandia’s leadership team and help develop and realize a strategic partnership vision and plan.”

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2021-2022 Collaboration Report