Senator Tim Kaine visits Tech research center in Northern Virginia

Senator Tim Kaine visited the Virginia Tech Research Center in Arlington on Tuesday to meet with President Timothy Sands in an effort to learn more about the university’s research initiatives.

“It is important for me to see first-hand the great research projects that are being funded through the partnership you have with different federal agencies,” said Kaine in a press release. "I can use this knowledge during budget deliberations."

While current estimates of budget cuts aimed at state-funded universities are expected to be less than originally thought, the decrease in public funding for schools will undoubtedly have an impact on the very research Kaine mentioned.

During his visit, Kaine was introduced to initiatives such as the Hume Center for National Security and Technology, which is working to develop new advances in cyber and national security technologies. The educational training portion of the program has recently been aiding in the shortage of qualified U.S. citizens needed to fill positions in federal cyber intelligence agencies.

Kaine also observed programs like the Discovery Analytics Center, which uses huge amounts of publicly available data to predict events like flu outbreaks and civil unrest, and the Bioinformatics Institute's Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab (NDSSL), which recently gained recognition for helping to estimate the propagation of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Tech has lead the way for years in many innovative areas of research and Kaine’s meeting with Sands signifies a need to address growing funding concerns that have resulted from a slowly recovering Virginia economy.

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