North Carolina’s Research Triangle area is providing research and career opportunities for the region as well as creating a diverse work force.
For Makendra Umstead, studying near the famed Research Triangle Park (RTP) in North Carolina’s Piedmont region seemed like an irresistible idea.
So the 18-year-old aspiring drug researcher chose to enroll at North Carolina Central University in 2007. The historically Black university is only about 15 minutes away from the research center, which boasts 170 companies involved in research and development in a variety of industries, such as life sciences and information technology. These include GlaxoSmithKline and IBM, and outside of RTP, but in the region, Merck.
There was one more reason for Umstead to pick NCCU. The school has just opened a new $20 million Biomanufacturing Research Institute and Technology Enterprise (BRITE) center, which is designed specifically to train crops of budding researchers and link them with the internships and jobs that the RTP offers.
“After my junior year, they will help set me up with internships at the park or elsewhere in the United States,” says Umstead, a sophomore fromRaleigh.
The convergence of higher education and research at the famed RTP has been all but idyllic for years. What happened there is a strong example of how regions can start their own home-grown, bootstrap efforts to harness local brains and draw in scientific research. An added bonus is that the BRITE center has benefited directly from efforts to stem deadly cigarette smoking, which has long been one of North Carolina’s major industries but is now facing steep decline.
Keeping Talent in State
The RTP was conceived back in the 1950s. At the time, North Carolina workers relied on low-paying textile and furniture jobs and small farms. Per capita incomes were among the lowest in the nation. The lack of decent jobs meant that more young people left for big Northern or Midwestern cities. If the young people happened to be Black, Jim Crow laws and strict societal limits on economic advancement gave them even more incentive tomove away.
