A recent partnership between SAS and NC State geared toward expanding research in cyber security, analytics and big data analysis is aiming to promote collaboration between the institutions and provide new opportunities for student researchers.
Terri Lomax, vice chancellor of the Office of Research, Innovation and Economic Development, said the new agreement would be able to provide an easier collaboration between researchers at NC State and SAS.
“It makes it so much easier to do business together, when our faculty and their researchers have an idea they want to work on together, they don’t have to negotiate a separate contract, the agreement allows them to just add a task order and get to work,” Lomax said.
Lomax said the new partnership will also provide opportunities for students to work at SAS due to the company’s large need for students in STEM disciplines within the company.
“The more students that we can interest in this agreement, and that we can interest in doing internships with SAS will lead to an increase in the STEM talent,” Lomax said.
The new agreement should also generate a lot of attention from various companies that want to collaborate with NC State in the future, which would be very beneficial to the university’s research programs, according to Lomax.
“We’ve had around 60 master research agreements with companies, but this is a very significant one due to our long history with SAS and the close alignment between our interests,” Lomax said.
Tim Wilson, senior Intellectual Property counsel for SAS, said before the research agreement was created, it was difficult to organize a set of conditions between the two employers due to various time constraints.
“It was difficult to get the terms and conditions ironed out between SAS and NC State given the time constraints and having classes beginning or ending, being able to get the contracts off the ground was difficult,” Wilson said.
The collaboration agreement outlines a set of pre-existing conditions for research projects, which will eliminate the time consumption of creating a set of separate conditions for each project.
“What this agreement will allow us to do is have a set of fundamental terms and conditions ironed out between SAS and NC State in advance, and now all we have to do now is identify a project and a cost and get it approved,” Wilson said.
In addition to eliminating the time consumption involved with writing a set of conditions for each product, the research agreement would increase the availability of research for students and faculty to become involved with at NC State.
“What it’s going to mean to the various professors and students is that the projects will be sponsored, there will be some funding that SAS is going to do at the University based upon the projects that we have mutually agreed to do,” Wilson said.
According to Wilson, though the new agreement has no distinction in the type of research funded, there will be a preference for the analytics, software programming and data visualization fields.
“We have many grads from NC State who are great employees, and I expect that trend to continue and be supplemented by people who work on research in this agreement,” Wilson said.
Graduates from NC State have historically found working opportunities with SAS, and this new agreement will help that trend continue and grow, Lomax said.
