UC Berkeley will be one of six initial universities across the country included in the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, a national initiative launched by President Barack Obama with the goal of creating more manufacturing jobs.
Obama’s plan will invest over $500 million in the development of different types of technology — such as informational, biological and nano technologies — by leveraging previous funds and budget proposals to jump-start the program. This investment could generate competitive technologies in the global industrial market.
The campus, along with a few other engineering powerhouses — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan — are all players in a complementary step to the AMP.
This collaboration establishes a commitment to form a multi-collaborative framework to share educational materials and research practices for advanced manufacturing.
All six institutions met June 28 via teleconference to begin talks in choosing a lead representative from each institution to speak on a committee regarding the collaboration of educational initiatives, said David Dornfeld, UC Berkeley’s temporary spokesperson for the initiative.
According to Dornfeld, chair of the department of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, AMP will ultimately be an initiative that contributes to a faster conversion between the development of ideas, which is usually explored at a university level, and production of new technologies, which are usually funded by industries.
In the partnership’s announcement at Carnegie Mellon University, Obama said that previous technological innovations, such as mobile phones and Global Positioning Systems, came from these kinds of partnerships.
“Companies usually do not invest in initial ideas because it will not pay off right away,” Obama said in his speech.
Obama said in the speech that AMP is an initiative in which the government can step in and make strategic decisions to bring people together to make critical investments in hopes of improving the relationship between companies and university research.
According to the plan, the federal government is taking steps to ensure the success of AMP, such as a collaborative investment across many federal agencies to leverage existing and future budgets for an initial $300 million investment in the innovative technology industry.
Some of the industries that will be included are Caterpillar, Ford, Intel Corporation and Johnson & Johnson.
Though funding for UC Berkeley has yet to be discussed, having the federal government place emphasis on a strategic direction toward university and industrial business is very important, Dornfeld said.
“No matter how it turns out, any attention is good for us,” Dornfeld said.
Henry Brady, dean of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, said that initiatives like AMP are becoming increasingly important in revitalizing the economy and creating jobs.
“I think it’s a tough road out there when most believe that cutting budgets are more important than investing,” Brady said. “It is critical to fund all kinds of research, especially those done by public institutions such as UC Berkeley, where many technological innovations are brought to industry.”
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