Research at Virginia Tech

The Office of the Vice President for Research supports the university community and its missions by fostering quality research and scholarship, providing access to funding information, enhancing the ability to respond to national research priorities and pursue opportunities, encouraging and directing inquiry into new and emerging fields, promoting solutions to problems and advances of basic knowledge in diverse disciplines and through interdisciplinary cooperation, ensuring compliance with policies and procedures related to research, marketing faculty talent and university capabilities within the university community and to external audiences, and fostering partnerships with outside agencies and businesses.

Virginia Tech has widely respected strengths in engineering and the life sciences. And our ability to marshal research resources and integrate capabilities across disciplines has enabled us to solve many complex problems.

We are building future research capability based on these traditional and unique strengths. Thus we are focused on the following:

1. Critical sciences and technologies — namely, advanced materials, energy, and the environment
2. Social and individual transformation — the arts, the individual, social policy, growth of metropolitan regions, and transportation — asking the question, “what can we do to advance society?”
3. Health, nutrition, and foods — with an initial focus on infectious disease and food safety, vaccines, epdemiology, new foods
4. Innovative technologies and complex systems — includes high performance computing, wireless telecommunication, robotics, and nanoscience and nanotechnology

In addition, we continue to support faculty members' insight and creativity in exploring new directions. Such exploration has been responsible for much of this nation's creation of new knowledge and leadership in many arenas that contribute to our quality of life.