July 19, Fred Chang, Inaugural Bobby B. Lyle Centennial Distinguished Chair in Cyber Security at SMU Dallas along with co-author Peter Schiffer (Professor of Applied Physics and professor of physics at Yale University) for a piece outlining opportunities and incentives for the intelligence community to develop partnerships with academia. Published in Issues in Science and Technology under the heading Academia’s Openness Could Strengthen its Partnerships With the Intelligence Community: https://tinyurl.com/5xfprwhh
Starting with Vannevar Bush’s seminal 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier, the federal government has invested significantly in support of fundamental research at universities across all areas of science and engineering. For even longer, government agencies have partneredwith universities to perform research in support of agency missions and to meet national needs. For example, the National Institutes of Health support health-related research, the Department of Agriculture supports agricultural research programs, and the Department of Energy supports energy solutions. And of course, since World War II, the Department of Defense has invested in defense-oriented research at universities.
Strong government-university research partnerships can be especially impactful to one sector of the government that is somewhat invisible to outsiders: the US intelligence community (IC). The IC comprises 18 organizations and agencies within the executive branch of the federal government—all with the shared mission of supporting the government’s understanding of the world by collecting, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence. Fulfilling this mission requires access to the most advanced science and technology (S&T) available. Today, the S&T landscape is evolving quickly, and it offers new opportunities and incentives for the IC to develop partnerships with academia. Done properly, enhancing such partnerships will benefit both national security and the academic research enterprise. Somewhat counterintuitively, we also argue that the open nature of academia presents special opportunities for higher impact.