Member Benefits
The ACSESS program is designed to build strong partnerships with U.S. industry and to become a significant computational science consulting resource. The program offers companies immediate access to the SDSU program by joining as an affiliate partner. For an annual contribution, your organization has admittance to our facilities, meetings, and seminars, as well as access to our computational resources and staff. As you identify particular problems with products, services, or environmental issues, we anticipate meeting with you (and your staff) to develop a Plan of Investigation. This plan should:
- Outline an approach to a solution.
- Determine the key personnel within your organization for coordination purposes.
- Identify one or more SDSU advisors with whom you will correspond. Once the plan is developed, we will select candidate students interested in pursuing the investigation under the leadership of one of our faculty.
In addition
We have strong relationships with DoD and DoE national laboratories, including Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). These facilities are virtually assured of maintaining a leadership role in computational assets. As a partner, we can provide the national laboratories with graduate students, post-docs, and un-classified research investigations. An expected quid pro quo is access to their computational infrastructure for both students and faculty. Extending these relationships can offer us opportunities for growing our indigenous computational infrastructure. Perhaps the most valuable gain will be those new and innovative research opportunities created by the practical needs of their on-going mission fulfillment. A growing expertise in areas driven by world-class, leading-edge problems can only enhance our ability to address classic industrial problems.
Disciplines & Applications
The ACSESS program helps build expertise in key, industrially important areas. By making excellence in research and commitment to interdisciplinary work primary criteria for the hiring of faculty, SDSU is growing a unique, interdisciplinary faculty base. Out of this wide base of expertise, advisors that fit the specific industrial problem quite closely can be found.
The list below presents fields of research deemed strategically important to industry, and fit well with our mission goals. In these fields, we currently have expertise in the various departments within the College of Sciences, and have an opportunity to establish a national presence. All of these fields are characterized as playing a prominent role in computation, as well as by their simultaneous relevance to a number of traditional, industrially-important disciplines. Furthermore, these fields have excellent funding opportunities, not only with national agencies such as the National Science Foundation, but also with the private sector. The various areas of science encompassed by these fields are listed in parentheses.
- Fluid dynamics (engineering, astrophysics, nuclear and plasma physics, mathematics, physics, biology, geology)
- Materials science (chemistry, physics, engineering)
- Biophysics (biology, biochemistry, chemistry, physics)
- Nonlinear dynamics, chaos, pattern formation (mathematics, physics, biology, meteorology, oceanography, engineering, economics)
- Environmental science (biology, physics, geology, engineering)
- Computational biology (computer science, biology, math, physics)
- Bioinformatics (computer science, biology, mathematics, physics, chemistry)