Research Clusters

The Creative Power of Collaboration
We’ve coined a new term for our teams of faculty, students, and industry partners who are pooling resources and expertise in order to solve the world’s problems more quickly. We call them “Research Clusters”

Our signature research clusters are powerful centers of creativity, where collaboration among teams of creative PEOPLE from a wide range of disciplines ignites synergy and excitement, generating the IDEAS that fuel the INNOVATION necessary to discover solutions to the world's most complex and compelling challenges. By working together across traditional boundaries, we're making the world a better place for all of us.

We're breaking down traditional disciplinary boundaries because we've learned that collaboration creates synergy, excitement, and creativity. And all of that leads to important new discoveries:

• Put professors and students from industrial, chemical, mechanical, and bio engineering on the same team, toss in a national lab, and you give birth to a brand new technology poised to transform the economic landscape of the Pacific Northwest by creating jobs and new companies
• Team computer scientists with civil engineers and you build the largest and most wired tsunami wave basin in the world… here at Oregon State
• Bring environmental, chemical, and bio engineers together with plant pathologists and botanists, and you get microbes that cleanup toxic waste and natural coatings for medical implants that save lives
• Turn chemists and electrical engineers loose in a lab and you invent the worlds’ first electronics that are transparent

The list goes on. And the results are the product of unprecedented levels of collaboration here at the College that span disciplines, departments, and even universities.

Collaborative business ventures is also the latest industry trend, so our work-ready graduates will be even better prepared to excel in the team-based environments of the business world. Especially because we continue to enhance our curriculum with what we call Platforms for Learning™ —some so unique that we’re marketing them to other top engineering schools.