Media, medicine prove fruitful for public-private partnerships
This story originally appeared on the Dallas Business Journal.
By Seth Bodine – Staff Writer, Dallas Business Journal
Story Highlights
- Construction chugs along for first phase of new Texas A&M campus.
- Aggies already partnering with big-name companies, influencing design of new buildings.
- School has set up temporary spaces to host public-private collaboration.
Construction is still ongoing for the first of several buildings that will make up the new downtown Fort Worth campus for Texas A&M University. But that’s not stopping the Aggies from setting up offices and starting to collaborate with outside companies — a preview of how the school will play a major role in the city’s economy.
Leaders of the Fort Worth-Tarrant County Innovation Partnership, the organization helping to set up collaborations between the university and various business interests, say industry partners are influencing the design of the second innovation-focused building planned for the campus.
Meanwhile, partnerships between A&M and businesses have already started or are expected to begin soon in temporary spaces near downtown.
The new Texas A&M Fort Worth campus is poised to reshape downtown, with a total of five new buildings planned. That includes the Law and Education Building, which will be devoted to the law school and other programs such as engineering, biotech and nutrition. That building is under construction and expected to open in 2026.
The first building for the new campus, the Law and Education building, is under construction and expected to open next year.
The second building, with a split-tower design, will be called the Research and Innovation Building and host a mix of industry partners and academic programs. Texas A&M Fort Worth Dean Robert Ahdieh previously said the school was in talks with Lockheed Martin, Alcon, gaming company ProbablyMonsters and Elbit Systems of America.
John Goff, chairman of the Fort Worth-Tarrant County Innovation Partnership, said the organization has set up countless meetings between various companies and Texas A&M officials to talk about connections that could be forged with the second building, which is expected to break ground early next year.
“What’s going to be in that building has a lot to do with what industry wants and how they’re engaged with all the expertise that exists at A&M, which there’s a lot of,” said Goff, who is also chairman of Crescent Real Estate.
One of those collaborations will be in health care. Texas A&M and Cook Children’s Medical Center plans to form a “biorepository” near campus. A biorepository is, in simple terms, a freezer that can store human tissue, said Darryl Heath, executive director of the Fort Worth-Tarrant County Innovation Partnership.
“Think of it as, frankly, a library, but instead of books, it has tissue,” Heath said. “A&M would manage the intake and the healthy storage of that tissue. And then hospital systems like Cook and … maybe others would check it out and check it in for research.”
Heath estimated the temporary space for the depository could be up and running by early spring. Heath also said Texas A&M will conduct collaborative research with Cook Children’s.
The Texas A&M University System’s new Center for Advanced Aviation Technologies will host its primary lab in the innovation building on the Fort Worth campus. That office, Heath said, should open in a temporary space by this September or October.
Another example of collaboration can be found in an unassuming red brick building in the Near Southside neighborhood of Fort Worth. Inside, A&M students and faculty are already working with advanced technology that is used on movie sets and during video game production to create immersive environments.
The university set up a 4,000-square-foot soundstage where students can create immersive 3D environments as part of the school’s Virtual Production Institute within A&M’s College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts. These virtual sets are increasingly being used in fields such as film and television, health care and even aerospace.
Using Unreal Engine, a sophisticated video game graphics engine, the studio can create photo-realistic environments, based off either real life or fantasy, from outer space to an underground cavern.
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