The National Nuclear Security Administration announced Wednesday that N.C. State has been awarded a $25 million grant to lead an effort to improve the monitoring of nuclear proliferation.

The initiative will seek to develop future nuclear nonproliferation and other nuclear security professionals and researchers, according to John Mattingly, a professor of nuclear engineering and co-principal investigator of the initiative.

The University was tapped to lead the consortium in a competitive-application process involving 22 other institutions. 

Robin Gardner, a professor of nuclear and chemical engineering, will serve as principal investigator of the Consortium for Nonproliferation Enabling Capabilities. . 

N.C. State’s partners in the consortium include the University of Michigan, Purdue University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Kansas State University, Georgia Tech and N.C. Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. Other members include Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest Laboratory.

The new consortium will bring together six departments in three colleges at the University and will start a graduate-fellowship program that will sponsor six fellows per year, Mattingly said.  

Mattingly said the Consortium will sponsor about 30 graduate students across all member universities.

N.C. State is home to the nation’s first university-based nongovernmental nuclear reactor for educational purposes, and it still maintains a small reactor on campus in Burlington Labs. 

The University is also the lead institution in the Department of Energy-funded Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, which aims to use computer simulations to build safer, most cost-effective nuclear power plants.

Established by Congress in 2000, the NNSA is a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy, which is responsible for improving national security through military applications of nuclear energy.   

The grant is the latest in a serious of multi-million-dollar initiatives that N.C. State has been awarded in the past year, one of which included a visit from President Barack Obama who announced a $140 million grant for semi-conductors in coordination with the Department of Energy. 

In addition, in August the National Security Agency announced that N.C. State would lead a $60 million Laboratory for Analytical Sciences on Centennial Campus to work on big-data problems. 

“It’s the dedicated leadership of the faculty that’s working hard to bring in these big projects,” Chancellor Randy Woodson said in an interview with The News & Observer. “With the nuclear proliferation project, for example, ours is one of the top nuclear engineering programs in the country, and that’s not something that just happens overnight.”