Capability Statement
Virginia Tech Overview
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University (Virginia Tech) is a comprehensive land grant university
serving the state and nation since 1872 through teaching, research,
and outreach. Renowned for its agricultural science and engineering
programs (ranked in the nation's top 25), Virginia Tech has built on
its ag/tech background to become a major research center in the
fields of bioinformatics and information technology.
Virginia Tech has over 25,000 students, 1,300 of them foreign, and almost 2,000 faculty. The university offers 110 graduate degree programs and has over 80 specialized research centers, laboratories, and institutes.
Virginia Tech has two facilities for graduate work in the Washington, D.C. area: the Alexandria Research Institute and the Northern Virginia Center. In Switzerland, Virginia Tech runs the Center for European Studies and Architecture.
At its main campus in Blacksburg, it is home to the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine. It also houses 104 technology companies at its Corporate Research Center.
Of Virginia Tech's 6,000 graduate students, 1,400 are engaged in IT-related research and development. Virginia Tech consistently ranks among the top 15 schools in the nation in number of patents received. High-tech research centers at Tech include the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, the International Institute for Information Technology, and the Laboratory for Advanced Scientific Computing and Applications.
In the field of agriculture, Virginia Tech continues to be a leader through the broad spectrum of research and extension conducted in the colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Natural Resources, as well as at 10 experiment stations located throughout the state.
OIRED Capabilities
The Office of International Research,
Education, and Development (OIRED) at Virginia Tech supports the
international mission of the University through collaborative
programs in research, education, and technical assistance. It
manages projects in more than 40 countries throughout Asia,
Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Russia, and Eastern
Europe. The current portfolio of over $21 million includes
projects dealing with natural resource management, information
technology, agriculture, environmental management,
capacity-building, greenhouse reduction, biodiversity and
biotechnology.
OIRED has fine-tuned a comprehensive participatory approach to project implementation and adapted it to sites around the world. This approach has promoted a local sense of ownership-necessary in order for change to occur. It has facilitated the involvement of a full range of stakeholders including men, women, farmers, traders, policy-makers, government officials, and others who have mutually identified and then honored each others' roles in the pursuit of making sustainable changes.