National Leadership Through Regional Cooperation (cont.)

Some in the nation may not at first link the Tennessee Valley with leading-edge technologies. After all, early in the last century, our area of southern Appalachia had a reputation as being barefoot and illiterate – and to many we were the poster child for Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society.

Yet what we now call the Tennessee Valley Corridor is also the home of two communities – Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Huntsville, Ala. – that were real leaders in the famed Manhattan and Apollo projects and have since grown into two of the nation’s most important centers for science, aerospace and national security. In fact, over the years, billions and billions of federal dollars have been invested in our region to help the nation meet these and many other important national objectives and federal missions.

That is why we decided to link together the multitude of valuable federal assets and research institutions in our region, as well as our top state research universities.We recognize their importance not only to new developments in science and technology and in fulfilling important federal missions, but also in creating higher-paying jobs for our communities.

Our goal was to build upon on such important Corridor assets as the:

• U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Alabama A&M University in North Alabama;

• U.S. Air Force’s Arnold Engineering Development Center and the University of Tennessee’s Space Institute near Tullahoma, Tenn.;

• University of Tennessee in Chattanooga and its new world-class computing SimCenter;

• Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex and the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education in Oak Ridge, Tenn.;

• University of Tennessee, the National Transportation Research Center, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the headquarters of the Tennessee Valley Authority, all in and around Knoxville, Tenn.;

• Center for Rural Development and the National Institute for Hometown Security in southern and eastern Kentucky;

• East Tennessee State University, the Quillen College of Medicine, and the Veterans Administration Regional Health Center in Northeast Tennessee; and

• Virginia Tech University in Southwest Virginia.

Under the leadership of the Corridor’s bipartisan delegation of eight congressmen and a number of the U.S. senators and governors representing our region, as well as the TVC’s board of public and private sector leaders, these organizations now join with hundreds of other key business, education, government and economic development leaders in our region at major regional economic summits. The summits concentrate on the importance of maximizing regional collaboration, advancing our federal missions and leveraging our assets for new job creation. Thanks to the linkages created at these summits and through several year-round initiatives, dozens of new collaborations are playing out up and down the corridor.

For instance, with the help and support of U.S. Senators Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn), Governor Phil Bredesen (D-Tenn.), the Tennessee legislature, and many others, we are leveraging several new world-class science and technology assets in the heart of the TVC to launch a new regional nanotechnology business initiative. The U.S. Department of Energy’s new $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) and a new $65 million Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, carved from 80 acres of woods adjacent to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, represents one of the largest new science projects in the world.

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