Education 2025: COLLINS, LANCE R.

Collins came to Virginia from Cornell University in August 2020 to build Virginia Tech’s $1 billion Innovation Campus and aid the commonwealth’s efforts to close a regional tech talent gap.

The first academic building on the Alexandria campus opened earlier this year, but computer science and engineering students started classes in temporary quarters in 2021. Virginia Tech also announced in May it’s setting up a new Institute for Advanced Computing in Alexandria that will be focused on AI, machine learning and quantum computing.

In Collins’ five years with Virginia Tech, the number of its computer science and computer engineering master’s degree students based in the D.C. area has grown to more than 500. Innovation Campus graduate students are part of Virginia’s $1.1 billion Tech Talent Investment Program, which aims to graduate 31,000 computer science and engineering grads in the next two decades.

Collins, who has a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2021. He also is a board member for Mitre, a McLean-based not-for-profit research and development company.

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