The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has awarded South Carolina State University (SCSU), a historically black institution in the city of Orangeburg, a two-year contract to evaluate the agency’s University Consortia on Nuclear Security.
The contract, awarded by NNSA’s Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research and Development (NA-22), is worth $173,940, according to an award notice posted Friday.
NA-22 is responsible for the nuclear security portion of the Integrated University Program (IUP), which integrates nuclear science and engineering research and development programs at universities with national laboratories and supports knowledge transfer from an aging nuclear technical workforce to the next generation.
The university’s evaluation will offer feedback to NA-22 on its projects, demonstrate program accomplishments, and provide support for program direction, NNSA said. The university has proposed two areas of evaluation: “a follow-up on all consortia participants to determine their contributions to the nuclear security community” and “a review of educational program models, which include individual; consortia; single university and laboratory-based,” according to the NNSA. This will also include assessments of the effectiveness of graduate fellowships and postgraduate appointments.
The effort will be led by Ken Lewis, dean of SCSU’s College of Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Technology, and Craig Williamson, director of the South Carolina Universities Research and Education Foundation, which was the lead organization for a previous nuclear workforce analysis.
The NNSA noted that NA-22 issued its first IUP university/laboratory consortia award in fiscal 2010, with the University of California, Berkeley as the lead institution. It then made two IUP awards in fiscal 2014 to consortia led by the University of Michigan and North Carolina State University.
