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Recent Articles from Tim Thornton
Out of the lab, into the market
Virginia Tech was born to promote business. The 1862 Morrill Act, which created land-grant universities including Virginia Tech, requires such universities to “teach such branches of learning as are related to … agriculture and the mechanical arts … to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.” Tech and every other university that […]
Virginia Tech’s proof-of-concept grants
It’s about gaps. Gaps between the uncertainties that exist and the uncertainties investors are willing to accept. Gaps between a working prototype and a mass-produced model. Gaps between what researchers produce and what the market wants to buy. Virginia tech’s proof-of-concept (POC) grants aim to help university researchers bridge those obstacles to commercializing their research. […]
Lexington sheds some Confederate monikers
Lexington memorializes Confederate Gens. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee so much, Lee’s final resting place in the city was described as “a kind of Confederate Graceland” in a 2009 Washington Post travel story. Lexington’s image changed some this summer, however. While Virginia Military Institute refused to remove Confederate statues and names from […]
Mack medium duty trucks on the road again
Founded by two brothers 120 years ago, Mack Trucks Inc. is an iconic American brand and image — snub-nosed trucks adorned with bulldogs because of a nickname earned in World War I. And since Sept. 1, all of Mack’s medium duty trucks are being built in Roanoke County’s Valley TechPark. The company, part of Sweden’s […]
Virginia Tech stakes claim on data science territory
Collecting and interpreting data has always been important in science, but Tom Woteki is at the start of a process that will teach Virginia Tech students how to make better use of information in scientific fields and possibly receive lucrative job offers. Director of the university’s data analysis and applied statistics program, the Arlington-based Woteki […]
A sense of possibility
Luiz DaSilva became the inaugural executive director of Virginia’s Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) in March, returning to Virginia Tech after two years in Ireland, where he served as the director of CONNECT, a telecommunications research center at Trinity College Dublin involving 35 companies and 250 researchers from 10 Irish universities. CONNECT’s goal is to produce […]
Hometown college
On the town of Wise’s website, information about the University of Virginia’s College at Wise sits behind an appropriately labeled tab: “Our College.” When U.Va. Wise was founded in 1954, it was called Clinch Valley College of the University of Virginia, and it was the commonwealth’s first public college west of Radford. More than a […]
Cyclical patterns
Last June, Volvo Group announced plans to invest nearly $400 million, add 350,000 square feet to its Dublin complex in Pulaski County — already the largest Volvo truck plant in the world — and hire 777 new workers over the next six years. Five months after that announcement, though, Volvo said it would lay off […]
Healthy and wealthy
Roanoke County’s main street — Electric Road (state Route 419) — is getting a big boost from the region’s largest employer. Carilion Clinic announced in September it had leased 150,000 square feet at Tanglewood Mall to accommodate Carilion’s growing children’s outpatient practices. Carilion, the Roanoke nonprofit that operates seven hospitals and more than 200 practice […]
Moving beyond coal
In 1923, the number of people earning a living mining coal in the United States peaked at 862,536. Now, that number is around 52,000, and many people and companies who relied on coal for income have fallen on hard times. That’s one reason the 2019 expansions of Paul’s Fan Co., which has been tied to […]
