The Future Lives Here
As unprecedented opportunities and accomplishments are taking place on each of the university’s campuses and institutes, the University of Tennessee is creating the FUTURE for Tennessee and the people who call this state home. UT is rising to the challenge by using the below resources to transform education, research, and economic development for the state and the nation.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Visit the Oak Ridge National Laboratoy website
The University of Tennessee—in partnership with Battelle—manages the largest open science laboratory in the nation. The partnership has $3 billion in funding for research, education and service. This is in addition to the hundreds of faculty and staff with joint appointments to the university and to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, creating interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists, researchers, professors, and partners in their pursuit of big science.
Because of the close proximity of UT’s flagship campus in Knoxville to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the soon-to-be developed Cherokee Farm, research and academic links are strong, making UT one of the country’s top higher education institutions.
Supercomputing
Visit the Supercomputing website
The University of Tennessee is home to two of the fastest computers on the planet—one of which is the fastest nonclassified computer in the world. The University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory soon will be home to two new machines that will shatter the petascale barrier, performing more than a thousand trillion calculations per second. One of these supercomputers was awarded in fall 2007 as part of a $65 million research grant from the National Science Foundation.
UT provides direct access for its campuses, researchers, and students to these elite, high-performance computing resources—and to one of the largest concentrations of computing expertise in the world—making solutions to global issues like climate change attainable.
Cherokee Farm
Visit the Cherokee Farm website
Cherokee Farm will be the innovation campus of the University of Tennessee, positioning the university and the state as one of the world’s most competitive areas for collaborative research. Drawing on already-established leadership in neutron research, materials science, computational science, and energy independence and sustainability, Cherokee Farm will strengthen those research agendas while helping maintain America’s competitiveness in the innovation economy of the 21st century.
This 188-acre site will engage the expertise of world-renowned researchers and private and public partners through the best resources and a unique interactive and interdisciplinary environment. As a hub of scientific research and innovation, Cherokee Farm will tackle—and solve—some of the world’s most complex issues.
Tennessee Biofuels Initiative
Visit the Tennessee Biofuels Initiative website
Increased energy independence, economic development, and environmental sustainability are the core goals of the Tennessee Biofuels Initiative. Through one of the first pilot biorefineries in the nation, Tennessee literally will grow an energy industry from the ground up as bioenergy scientists combine their expertise in converting switchgrass and other plant biomass into ethanol.
The state has allocated $70 million for the Initiative—some $40.7 million of which is specifically set aside to construct a pilot biorefinery in East Tennessee. The principal product will be cellulosic ethanol derived from Tennessee-grown biomass, specifically switchgrass. This new biobased economy is projected to create $100 million annually in new farm revenue and 4,000 new jobs in regional biorefineries in Tennessee.
The SimCenter: National Center for Computational Engineering
UT Chattanooga’s SimCenter is a research and education center that specializes in high-fidelity, physics-based computational modeling and simulation, using high-performance scientific supercomputing to solve real-world problems that arise in engineering analysis and design applications from any engineering discipline. Its multidisciplinary research team combines specialized science and engineering with computational mathematics, scientific computing and other technical disciplines.