Establishment (left), visiting GTRI Director Don Grace in 1984.|alt=A black-and-white photograph of two men sitting by a low table talking to each other. The man on the left is much older, has white hair, and is wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and a dark tie. He sitting on a plaid couch and gesturing with his right hand as he speaks. The man on the left is younger, has dark hair, and is wearing a light jacket, dark pants, a white shirt, and a patterned tie. He is sitting on a chair with his arms resting on his legs as he leans forward to listen to the other man. After being founded in 1885,
Georgia Tech grew from a trade school into a university over several decades. However, there was little state initiative to see the school expand significantly until 1919. That year, in a move similar to the
Hatch Act of 1887's establishment of
agricultural experiment stations, the federal debate over whether to create engineering experiment stations similarly spurred the
Georgia General Assembly to pass an act titled "Establishing State Engineering Experiment Station at the Georgia School of Technology." This station was established with the goal of the "encouragement of industries and commerce" within the state. In 1929, some Georgia Tech faculty members belonging to
Sigma Xi started a Research Club at Tech that met once a month. One of the monthly subjects, proposed by
W. Harry Vaughan, was a collection of issues related to Georgia Tech, such as library development, and the development of a state engineering station. This group investigated the forty existing engineering experiment stations at universities around the country, and a report was compiled by
Harold Bunger,
Montgomery Knight, and Vaughan in December 1929. The station's initial areas of focus were
textiles,
ceramics, and
helicopter engineering. The station's name was technically the State Engineering Experiment Station, but it was generally referred to as the Engineering Experiment Station (EES) or simply "the research station". Vaughan was instrumental in securing a permanent building for the station, initially known as the Research Building; several years later it was expanded and named the Thomas Hinman Research Building, after Atlanta dentist and university donor Thomas Hinman. After Vaughan left for the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1940, Bunger's successor was
Gerald Rosselot, who had been appointed assistant director by Georgia Tech's president in 1940.
World War II |alt=A black-and-white photograph of a young man examining a large microscope. The man has short, dark hair, is wearing a white shirt and a white lab coat and is holding a smoking pipe in his mouth. The microscope has a black conical base with three trapezoidal windows and a silver cylindrical body. The number and value of contracts coming to the station significantly increased during
World War II; the 1943–1944 budget was the first in which industry and government contracts exceeded the station's other income, most notably, its state appropriation. Director Vaughan had initially prepared the faculty for fewer incoming contracts as the Georgia General Assembly had cut the station's appropriation by 40%, Two of the larger projects were a study on the
propagation of electromagnetic waves, and
United States Navy–sponsored radar research. Important investments during Rosselot's administration at the Engineering Experiment Station included the purchase of an
electron microscope in 1946 for $13,000 (equivalent to $ in ), the first such instrument in the
Southeastern United States and one of few in the United States at the time. The Research Building was expanded, and a $300,000 (equivalent to $ in )
Westinghouse A-C network calculator was given to Georgia Tech by
Georgia Power in 1947. Rosselot's administration included the 1946 establishment of the Industrial Development Council, renamed to the Georgia Tech Research Institute in 1948 and its present name, the Georgia Tech Research Corporation, in 1984. The
Georgia Board of Regents had ruled that all money received in a year had to be spent that year, which was problematic because most government contracts the EES had received spanned multiple years. The new organization was almost immediately used to weather a severe drop in state support (from $89,000 to $3,000) during the
recession of 1949. Robinson worked as the general manager without pay for the first year; after the fledgling company's first contract resulted in a $4,000 loss, Robinson (upon request) refunded five of the six other initial investors. When it was founded in October 1951, Rosselot was president and CEO of Scientific Associates; at issue was the potential conflict of interest with his role at Georgia Tech, and what, if any, role Georgia Tech should have in
technology transfer to the marketplace. Emerson later instituted a policy requiring EES employees wishing to work with Scientific Associates to make a written request to the president of Georgia Tech. Though Rosselot denied malfeasance, the practice nonetheless did not conform to the University System of Georgia's established procedures for budget reporting. As a result, Rosselot went on leave from his post at Georgia Tech in November 1952, pending the acceptance of his resignation by the chancellor, which became effective March 1, 1953.
Cold War era In March 1950,
Herschel H. Cudd was appointed head of EES's Chemical Sciences division. After Gerald Rosselot went on leave pending his resignation, Cudd was named acting director of EES in November 1952, then named director in July 1953, and resigned in November 1953 to accept a much higher-paying position at the American Viscoe Corporation. Although he was in the post for only a year, Cudd made far-reaching changes to the station. Under Rosselot, research had been increasingly concentrated on a few researchers; Cudd reversed this trend to the extent that EES's 1952–53 Annual Report stated that 66 faculty in 15 schools performed research at the station that year. Cudd created a new promotion system for researchers that is still in use to this day. Many EES researchers held the rank of
professor despite lacking a doctorate (or a comparable qualification for promotion as determined by the Georgia Board of Regents), something that irritated members of the teaching faculty. The new system, approved in the spring of 1953, used the Board of Regents' qualifications for promotion and mirrored the academic tenure track. Cudd spent a significant amount of the EES operating budget on improving laboratory facilities. Cudd's successor
Paul K. Calaway, previously director of the School of Chemistry, made a last-minute request to the contract organization in May 1954 to cover the resulting $20,000 (equivalent to $ in ) deficit. In 1954, a faculty committee appointed to do a comprehensive study of Georgia Tech, "The Aims and Objectives of the Georgia Institute of Technology", noted that of EES's budget of $2 million for 1953–1954 (equivalent to $ million in ), about 83% was sponsored by governmental agencies, and about two thirds of that was classified. This period saw a significant expansion in Georgia Tech's
postgraduate education programs, which received substantial support from the EES. While at Georgia Tech, Boyd wrote an influential article about the role of
research centers at
institutes of technology, which argued that research should be integrated with education, and Boyd correspondingly involved undergraduates in his research. Boyd was known for recruiting faculty capable of both teaching and performing notable research; one such example is his recruitment of noted physicist and nuclear scientist
Earl W. McDaniel. Under Boyd's purview, the Engineering Experiment Station gained many electronics-related contracts, to the extent that an Electronics Division was created in 1959; it would focus on radar and communications. Boyd championed the establishment of research facilities. In 1955, Georgia Tech president Blake Van Leer appointed Boyd to Georgia Tech's Nuclear Science Committee. Throughout the Cold War era, radar and antenna related applications remained a prominent research activity in EES' contracts with the Defense Department.
Millimeter wave radar research, in particular, was prominent in EES' defense activities from the late 1950s, when the first military-designation millimeter-wave radar was built at Georgia Tech, to the 1980s, when GTRI developed what was then the world's highest frequency microwave radar. EES' high-frequency radar research found applications in radio astronomy, meteorology and climate studies, which improved weather forecasting and climate models and assisted in NASA's planning of the
Cassini and
Galileo missions. President
Ronald Reagan's
Strategic Defense Initiative resulted in the largest research contract in Georgia Tech's history in 1985. The $21.3 million contract (equivalent to $ million in ) was divided between GTRI and the School of Electrical Engineering. On April 10, 1989, GTRI announced that one of its research groups, led by
James Mahaffey, had duplicated the results of a controversial
University of Utah experiment that had allegedly achieved
cold fusion in a jar of water. Four days following the announcement, the researchers discovered that the instrument used to measure neutrons was damaged by the heat of the liquid and gave false, elevated readings. This led to an expansion of some of EES' activities that it had been involved in since the 1940s. In particular, EES began providing additional services as a
technological incubator during this time frame, and began an international development initiative that improved infrastructure and facilitated technology transfer in over 40 developing nations. The late 1960s saw a period of student unrest, and university research centers that worked on contracts for the Department of Defense were often the site of student protests. Neither Georgia Tech nor EES became the focus of protests, and Long attributed this to the school's "conservative student body". Georgia Tech president
Arthur G. Hansen's "bold and controversial" solution to both entities' problems was to completely absorb the station into Georgia Tech's academic units. On paper, this would dramatically increase Georgia Tech's stated research funding (as all of it would be performed through the academic units), and it would increase options and financial aid for graduate students. Another, less publicized, reason was that Georgia Tech would gain access to the contract organization's reserve fund, which was said to be over $1 million (equivalent to $ million in ). EES employees and business executives involved with the station appealed to the
Georgia Board of Regents and to
Governor of Georgia (and future United States president)
Jimmy Carter (himself a Georgia Tech alumnus); the controversy received coverage in both
The Technique and the
Atlanta Constitution. When former EES director James E. Boyd was appointed as interim president of Georgia Tech following the departure of Hansen, he stopped the plan for complete absorption of the station, but did allow plans for closer control and more aggressive contract solicitation to proceed. During his tenure, Stelson reorganized the station into eight semi-autonomous laboratories in order to allow each to develop a specialization and clientele, a model it retains (with slight modifications) to this day. The Engineering Experiment Station was renamed the Georgia Tech Research Institute in 1984. A separate organization originally called the Industrial Development Council, changed its name to the Georgia Tech Research Institute in February 1946, and finally to the
Georgia Tech Research Corporation in 1984. There are legal difficulties when an American university wishes to accept contracts from some entities, especially the federal government, so the second organization is a contracting organization. Most importantly, it allows the university to perform multi-year contracts that are not possible under state law, which requires that money received must be spent in the same fiscal year. During his tenure the percentage of GTRI's budget from the DOD did experience a small decrease (from 76 percent to 70 percent), but this was balanced by increased research in other fields. Truly was replaced by
Edward K. Reedy, who served from 1998 to 2003. Reedy encouraged funding researchers who had ideas that needed support, and introduced a new cost accounting standard for recovering indirect expenditures. Reedy was particularly influential in securing the $7.3 million in funding required to build the Food Processing Technology Building. Under his leadership, GTRI's first
endowed chair was established in March 1998 in honor of
Glen P. Robinson, the $1.5 million Glen P. Robinson Chair in Electro-Optics. GTRI and Georgia Tech played host to sitting president
George W. Bush in March 2002; a mock disaster was staged during the visit, demonstrating new technologies. At the end of Reedy's tenure, GTRI had $115 million in research contracts (equivalent to $ in ), a new high. Much new funding came as an indirect result of the
September 11 attacks and the resulting
war on terrorism as the DOD increased related research. In March 2010, Cross was named Executive Vice President for Research, a newly created position within Georgia Tech with oversight over all research at the university, including GTRI, the
Georgia Tech Research Corporation, the school's
interdisciplinary research centers, and the Enterprise Innovation Institute; and will "work closely with" academic researchers. He began his new role on May 1, 2010, and was replaced as director by
Robert McGrath. Some recent notable projects have included the
Deployable Joint Command and Control System and
ULTRA AP, a
concept combat vehicle. In 2010, researchers developed microfabricated planar ion traps using VLSI techniques for use in a
trapped ion quantum computer. Also in 2010, researchers developed a method of using
GPGPU to crack passwords, coming up with a minimum secure password length of 12 characters. Researchers are investigating the use of radar as a possible
concussion detection tool. GTRI is the primary contractor of the
Homeland Open Security Technology program, which aims to promote the creation and use of
open security and
open-source software in the United States government and military, especially in areas pertaining to
computer security. GTRI personnel are involved in
DARPA's
Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales project through the
Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning system. In 2016, former GTRI employees were charged with fraud by misusing PCard that were for official Georgia Tech business purposes, but were used for personal purposes. In 2018, the U.S. Army renewed a 10-year contract with GTRI worth $2.35 billion for the Department of Defense. In 2019, Georgia Tech won a U.S.
Air Force engineering contract worth up to $491 million with the condition of meeting certain criteria after 5 years. ==Description==