NARRAGANSETT, R.I. -- For 50 years, researchers at URI's oceanography school have tracked killer storms, mapped global warming and analyzed oil spills around the world. They've netted hundreds of millions of dollars for research.
Providence Journal photo / Bob Thayer
Marina Reilly-Collette, left, a research assistant in the Ocean engineering Department at URI, sets up an experiment in a water tank to study the characteristics of energy derived from water current. At right is teaching assistant Amanda Persichetti.
NARRAGANSETT, R.I. -- For 50 years, researchers at URI's oceanography school have tracked killer storms, mapped global warming and analyzed oil spills around the world. They've netted hundreds of millions of dollars for research.
But the university has been less successful in turning discoveries made in labs into private companies. Since the 1980s, graduates from the oceanography school have started only a handful of still-operating businesses in the state.
One, Applied Science Associates in South Kingstown, is part of a larger company with offices in Shanghai and Dubai. But most employ a dozen workers or fewer.
"Companies like ours are making instruments for a market," says Alfred Hanson, an oceanography school alum in business for 16 years. But, he adds, students at URI "aren't being trained in that tradition."
That is changing, say top officials at the state university.
SUNDAY The university is developing the resources to turn discoveries into private companies. Read the story in the Providence Sunday Journal newspaper and eEdition.
Updated December 1, 2012 3:28 PM