U.S. military contract could help Black university become research powerhouse | Science

The U.S. Air Force wants scientists at Howard University to figure out how its fighter pilots can team up with robotic co-pilots to defeat enemy combatants.

But aerial superiority isn’t the only goal of Howard’s new Research Institute for Tactical Autonomy (RITA). University officials are also hoping the Air Force’s initial 5-year, $90 million investment in RITA—under a special arrangement that makes additional funding all but certain—will help Howard became the first historically Black institution to ascend to the top ranks of the nation’s research universities.

“This should be a real game changer,” predicts Danda Rawat, an electrical engineer and associate dean for research at Howard who will be RITA’s founding director. “We’ve been doing a lot with a small amount of resources,” says Rawat, who now directs a $7.5 million Department of Defense (DOD) center of excellence on artificial intelligence and machine learning. But the new university-affiliated research center (UARC) announced in January “is a huge step.”

The Air Force’s expected long-term investment in Howard, one of the nation’s 104 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), addresses a congressional mandate that DOD begin to distribute its massive research budget more equitably. The UARC—the 15th such center funded by DOD and the first for the Air Force—is a potent mechanism for doing so.

Special rules that allow a UARC to receive a steady stream of DOD contracts without external competition have fueled the growth of such academic powerhouses as Johns Hopkins University. In 1941, a project at Hopkins to develop a more lethal artillery shell morphed into DOD’s first UARC, the Applied Physics Laboratory. APL is now a $2-billion-a-year juggernaut with more than 8200 employees.

No HBCU has a research budget even 1/10th that size. “I’m told this is largest research award ever received by an HBCU,” says Victoria Coleman, chief scientist for the Air Force. “The underresourcing of HBCUs didn’t get created overnight, and the problem isn’t going to get solved overnight. And in my book, [this center] is still not enough. But a vehicle like UARC, something that’s going to be there for the long haul, can be an important stepping stone.”

In announcing the Howard contract, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin noted that HBCUs train 30% of all Black scientists and engineers yet receive only 0.05% of DOD’s massive R&D budget, which is approaching $100 billion. In 2020, Congress directed the agency to do more to build the research capacity of HBCUs, and the next year it gave DOD permission to use the UARC funding mechanism to achieve those goals.

Last year, legislators were even more explicit, telling DOD to target funding to HBCUs striving to join the roughly 150 universities labeled R1 under a voluntary classification system for academic institutions based on their research activity. In response, DOD took the unprecedented step of restricting competition for the UARC to the 11 HBCUs that had announced the goal of becoming R1s. Four submitted proposals, and in January the Air Force chose Howard, arguably the best known HBCU, as the lead institute in a consortium of eight HBCUs that will operate RITA.

The institute’s mission is to develop technologies that make possible seamless and instantaneous joint reasoning and decision-making between human and machine. That is a much bigger challenge than the autonomy needed for a self-driving vehicle, Rawat says.

Those who follow defense research give the Air Force’s decision a thumbs-up. “This award makes perfect sense given the congressional directive,” says Andrew Metrick, a defense fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “Tactical autonomy is a critical need for the Air Force,” he notes, and the cachet of a UARC will make it easier for Howard to win contracts from other branches of the military for related work.

Coleman says some senior Air Force officials had reservations about forming a major, long-term relationship with an HBCU because it lacked the pedigree of the top-tier research universities that operate most UARCs. But Coleman says her boss, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, backed her up when she presented the idea of an HBCU-only competition for a new UARC. “‘What took you so long?’” Coleman recalls his reaction. “That was a really good day.”

In holding the competition for its new UARC, the Air Force decided it would only accept proposals from consortia of institutions, seeing that structure as a good way to both build capacity across HBCUs and to draw on their unique assets. DOD first used that approach 15 years ago in funding a UARC on systems engineering, and its director says there is strength in numbers.

“When you’re a large university, your natural inclination is to think you can do it all yourself,” says Dinesh Verma, a systems engineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology who has led the Systems Engineering Research Center since its formation. “There were quite a few naysayers at the beginning because all the previous UARCs were located at large, well-established universities. But a smaller university is more open to the idea of a network, which has worked very well.”

Bindu Nair, head of DOD’s basic research office, hopes the RITA will not only help Howard attain R1 status, but also expand the nation’s pool of STEM talent. “Being an R1 is what higher ed uses to measure research capacity,” says Nair, a materials scientist who came up through the Army’s research system. But a more important goal, she says, “is creating more students capable of doing high-quality research. And if institutions are committed to doing that, then we will support them in getting to where they want to be.”

The heavy teaching load carried by HBCU faculty is a major impediment to becoming a research powerhouse, Nair says. “We hear it from them all the time: ‘How am I supposed to focus on my research if I have these requirements in terms of teaching?’ But they don’t want to give up the teaching, because that’s where a lot of the mentoring takes place.”

The promise of continued funding that comes with a UARC is designed to remove that obstacle, Coleman says. “If you have money to do research, you also have money through overhead that allows you to hire additional people,” she says. “And the UARC will give them the confidence to add faculty, equip their labs, and build up their programs by training more students.”

Now in temporary quarters on Howard’s main campus in northwestern Washington, D.C., RITA expects to move early next year into a 10-story building being renovated at an off-campus site a few kilometers away. Bruce Jones, Howard’s vice president for research, can’t wait to see it in action.

“When DOD commits to a UARC, it’s not just to fund more research,” Jones says. “It’s also a promise to mentor the next generation.”

The U.S. Air Force wants scientists at Howard University to figure out how its fighter pilots can team up with robotic co-pilots to defeat enemy combatants.

But aerial superiority isn’t the only goal of Howard’s new Research Institute for Tactical Autonomy (RITA). University officials are also hoping the Air Force’s initial 5-year, $90 million investment in RITA—under a special arrangement that makes additional funding all but certain—will help Howard became the first historically Black institution to ascend to the top ranks of the nation’s research universities.

“This should be a real game changer,” predicts Danda Rawat, an electrical engineer and associate dean for research at Howard who will be RITA’s founding director. “We’ve been doing a lot with a small amount of resources,” says Rawat, who now directs a $7.5 million Department of Defense (DOD) center of excellence on artificial intelligence and machine learning. But the new university-affiliated research center (UARC) announced in January “is a huge step.”

The Air Force’s expected long-term investment in Howard, one of the nation’s 104 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), addresses a congressional mandate that DOD begin to distribute its massive research budget more equitably. The UARC—the 15th such center funded by DOD and the first for the Air Force—is a potent mechanism for doing so.

Special rules that allow a UARC to receive a steady stream of DOD contracts without external competition have fueled the growth of such academic powerhouses as Johns Hopkins University. In 1941, a project at Hopkins to develop a more lethal artillery shell morphed into DOD’s first UARC, the Applied Physics Laboratory. APL is now a $2-billion-a-year juggernaut with more than 8200 employees.

No HBCU has a research budget even 1/10th that size. “I’m told this is largest research award ever received by an HBCU,” says Victoria Coleman, chief scientist for the Air Force. “The underresourcing of HBCUs didn’t get created overnight, and the problem isn’t going to get solved overnight. And in my book, [this center] is still not enough. But a vehicle like UARC, something that’s going to be there for the long haul, can be an important stepping stone.”

In announcing the Howard contract, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin noted that HBCUs train 30% of all Black scientists and engineers yet receive only 0.05% of DOD’s massive R&D budget, which is approaching $100 billion. In 2020, Congress directed the agency to do more to build the research capacity of HBCUs, and the next year it gave DOD permission to use the UARC funding mechanism to achieve those goals.

Last year, legislators were even more explicit, telling DOD to target funding to HBCUs striving to join the roughly 150 universities labeled R1 under a voluntary classification system for academic institutions based on their research activity. In response, DOD took the unprecedented step of restricting competition for the UARC to the 11 HBCUs that had announced the goal of becoming R1s. Four submitted proposals, and in January the Air Force chose Howard, arguably the best known HBCU, as the lead institute in a consortium of eight HBCUs that will operate RITA.

The institute’s mission is to develop technologies that make possible seamless and instantaneous joint reasoning and decision-making between human and machine. That is a much bigger challenge than the autonomy needed for a self-driving vehicle, Rawat says.

Those who follow defense research give the Air Force’s decision a thumbs-up. “This award makes perfect sense given the congressional directive,” says Andrew Metrick, a defense fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “Tactical autonomy is a critical need for the Air Force,” he notes, and the cachet of a UARC will make it easier for Howard to win contracts from other branches of the military for related work.

Coleman says some senior Air Force officials had reservations about forming a major, long-term relationship with an HBCU because it lacked the pedigree of the top-tier research universities that operate most UARCs. But Coleman says her boss, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, backed her up when she presented the idea of an HBCU-only competition for a new UARC. “‘What took you so long?’” Coleman recalls his reaction. “That was a really good day.”

In holding the competition for its new UARC, the Air Force decided it would only accept proposals from consortia of institutions, seeing that structure as a good way to both build capacity across HBCUs and to draw on their unique assets. DOD first used that approach 15 years ago in funding a UARC on systems engineering, and its director says there is strength in numbers.

“When you’re a large university, your natural inclination is to think you can do it all yourself,” says Dinesh Verma, a systems engineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology who has led the Systems Engineering Research Center since its formation. “There were quite a few naysayers at the beginning because all the previous UARCs were located at large, well-established universities. But a smaller university is more open to the idea of a network, which has worked very well.”

Bindu Nair, head of DOD’s basic research office, hopes the RITA will not only help Howard attain R1 status, but also expand the nation’s pool of STEM talent. “Being an R1 is what higher ed uses to measure research capacity,” says Nair, a materials scientist who came up through the Army’s research system. But a more important goal, she says, “is creating more students capable of doing high-quality research. And if institutions are committed to doing that, then we will support them in getting to where they want to be.”

The heavy teaching load carried by HBCU faculty is a major impediment to becoming a research powerhouse, Nair says. “We hear it from them all the time: ‘How am I supposed to focus on my research if I have these requirements in terms of teaching?’ But they don’t want to give up the teaching, because that’s where a lot of the mentoring takes place.”

The promise of continued funding that comes with a UARC is designed to remove that obstacle, Coleman says. “If you have money to do research, you also have money through overhead that allows you to hire additional people,” she says. “And the UARC will give them the confidence to add faculty, equip their labs, and build up their programs by training more students.”

Now in temporary quarters on Howard’s main campus in northwestern Washington, D.C., RITA expects to move early next year into a 10-story building being renovated at an off-campus site a few kilometers away. Bruce Jones, Howard’s vice president for research, can’t wait to see it in action.

“When DOD commits to a UARC, it’s not just to fund more research,” Jones says. “It’s also a promise to mentor the next generation.”