Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Wright State’s Applied Research Corp. is leading a $49 million effort to strengthen the Air Force’s ties to business and universities while finding future problem-solvers.
WSARC has been selected to lead a “bold, first-of-its-kind” U.S. Air Force Academic Partnership and Engagement Experiment — dubbed “APEX” — program to boost Air Force partnerships with academia, the institution said in a release.
“A big part of it is collaboration and education and connecting people together who don’t normally get connected,” Dennis Andersh, president and chief executive of WSARC, said in an interview.
WSARC will be the lead agency assisting the Air Force in that process, Andersh said.
The work “will be countrywide,” he said. “We’ll start in smaller regions to begin with. But eventually it will be across the country.”
The idea is to accelerate technology transfer from universities to industry and the Air Force.
“They’re looking for ingenuity, new technologies, but they’re also looking for the workforce and the workforce employees,” Andersh said. “This is a way of trying to attract new talent.”
