A Step Toward High-Tech Jobs for the Region

The region took an important step toward a university-level research facility for engineering last week. The Center for Advanced Engineering and Research, a Region 2000 initiative, broke ground on a research campus at New London Business and Technology Center on U.S. 460.

The engineering center has been planned for years and will be paid for with a $7.6 million grant in economic development funds from the Virginia Tobacco Commission. The 26,000-square-foot facility will be built on about eight acres and is scheduled to open in about a year.

The campus is a major step forward for engineers who want to train here and for businesses here that have engineering needs.

CAER executive director Bob Bailey said the center is designed to create a “research university environment” where engineering educators and researchers at large and small businesses in the area can collaborate.

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Economic development planning more than five years ago spawned the idea to create the center, Bailey said. That process, he added, showed that the Lynchburg area lacked a research university that high-tech companies need to expand.

At the heart of the engineering center is what he called “knowledge creation,” which is something that sets a research university apart from other colleges. “You’re constantly pushing the barriers of what we already know, looking for some new thing,” he said. “New commercialized products come out of knowledge creation.”

Having a physical engineering facility will help small companies, such as Innovative Wireless Technologies in Forest, said Eric Hansen, president of the firm. He added that its presence will increase the Lynchburg area’s capacity for technology-based economic development.

“When you bring something like that to the area, it will feed spin-offs and new companies and create a very strong economic catalyst,” he said.

According to Bailey, most of the research CAER has coordinated recently takes place at Virginia Tech or the University of Virginia. Having the facility in Bedford County will bring the research closer to the companies that need it.

One of those companies is Lynchburg-based Areva. A centerpiece of the research facility will be a control room simulator, said Bailey. He added that the simulator was included in the building’s design because local companies, including Areva on Old Forest Road, one of the world’s leaders in the production of nuclear energy, said it was needed.

There was another reason for the control room simulator. The research center needed something to set it apart from other labs. As Bailey described it earlier this year, “There’s nothing like this in the country. There is not a fully configurable control room simulator for the new generation of plants.”

He added that the simulator will help test wireless control and security technology.

CAER’s research campus will be an important tool in attracting high-tech economic development to Region 2000. It’s a good example of regional planning and could be an important move toward increasing the number of high-tech jobs here in the near future.