About

National security has been part of the mission of discovery science at America’s major research universities for generations, which conduct over two-thirds of the academic research the Department of Defense funds. Universities are not newcomers to this work — they are its backbone.

National security research is public-interest research. It protects the food supply, the power grid, public health, and the systems daily life depends on. It develops technologies — from weather satellites to the internet itself — that transform civilian life. And it ensures that the values universities embody, including openness and free inquiry, are represented in how the nation approaches its security.

The Association of American Universities, of which UW–Madison is a member, documents how the nation’s leading research universities protect warfighters and strengthen the national defense.

National security research at UW–Madison includes everything from securing the power grid, preparing for pandemics, developing vaccines, advancing quantum science, creating materials for extreme environments, forecasting weather from space, nuclear deterrence, defending the computer networks daily life runs on, and protecting the health of service members, veterans, and civilians.

Public research universities were built for this work. The land-grant mission that created UW–Madison is a compact with the public: pursuit of knowledge in national service to the people. The Wisconsin Idea holds that the university’s influence should extend beyond the borders of campus, and no service extends further than helping keep the nation’s people secure.

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The Department of Defense sponsors University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs) at more than a dozen universities, most of them public. Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory, a Navy UARC founded in 1945, is that university’s largest research unit, with more than a thousand faculty and staff. The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Washington each operate Navy applied research laboratories; Utah State runs the Space Dynamics Laboratory; the University of Maryland hosts ARLIS, an intelligence and security laboratory; and the Georgia Tech Research Institute has served the Army for decades.

A new generation of university national security institutes, organizationally much like WINS, has emerged in just the past few years. Penn State launched a National Security Institute under its research office to accelerate research into mission-ready solutions, complementing its 80-year-old laboratory. The University of Minnesota established a National Security Research Institute as a hub connecting faculty and students with defense and security sponsors. Vanderbilt created an Institute of National Security, and Purdue stood up the Purdue Applied Research Institute as the applied-research arm of its national security efforts.

In the Big Ten, Purdue has made hypersonics a university-defining priority, opening a $41 million facility and coordinating a national consortium whose members include Illinois, Michigan, Michigan State, and Indiana. The University of Minnesota is a key partner on a $1.1 billion defense aerospace complex.

Outside of the Big Ten, Johns Hopkins APL is the nation’s largest university-affiliated defense laboratory, and MIT has run Lincoln Laboratory for the Air Force since the 1950s. The University of California has helped steward the National Laboratories since the 1940s.

National security is about protecting our people, our health, our food, and our infrastructure. Most national security research looks like the rest of the university’s research: pandemic preparedness and vaccines, resilient energy systems, secure computing, weather satellites, advanced materials, brain health for those who serve. The technologies that keep the nation safe are overwhelmingly the same technologies that improve civilian life; GPS, the internet, jet travel, and modern medicine all trace to security-motivated research. For example, UW–Madison’s Engineering Moonshots are all areas of great national security importance.

WINS exists to create opportunities. Individual faculty always choose whether and how to engage.

National security funding at UW–Madison supports the concussion science protecting kids and service members alike, the teams bringing missing service members home to their families after 80 years, the fusion-made isotopes behind tens of thousands of cancer scans every day, breakthroughs against lung disease, and the laboratory keeping watch over the nation’s milk supply.

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Dual-use research serves both civilian and security needs, and it describes most of the technologies that define modern life. GPS began as a military navigation system and now underpins everything from farming to shipping to ride-sharing. The internet grew from a defense research network. Satellite meteorology — a field Wisconsin helped invent — serves military operations and the daily forecast alike. Fusion research promises both strategic energy advantage and clean power for everyone.

That is the practical case for engagement. Dual-use research builds Wisconsin companies, creates Wisconsin jobs, equips Wisconsin students for consequential careers, and delivers discoveries that improve life in Wisconsin and beyond, while strengthening the nation’s security. It is the Wisconsin Idea working in both directions.

The great majority of national security research at universities is fundamental research: openly published, openly discussed, and conducted by students and faculty in the course of ordinary academic life. Longstanding federal policy holds that the products of fundamental research should remain unrestricted to the maximum extent possible, and the university’s engagement is built on that principle.

Most national security research is open research. UW–Madison’s commitment to open scholarship and academic freedom — the freedom to sift and winnow — is foundational, and WINS operates within that commitment. Every scholar is free to follow their questions wherever they lead. For some, those questions lead to the health of a child or the origins of the universe. For others, they lead to the security of the nation. Frequently, these questions overlap in unexpected ways.

All of it is the search for truth, and it belongs at a great university.

Where specific projects carry publication or participation constraints, those constraints are governed by university policy and state law, and faculty decide for themselves whether to participate.

National security research is subject to the same rigorous infrastructure that governs all research at UW–Madison: human subjects and animal care review, biosafety and biosecurity programs, export control compliance, conflict-of-interest oversight, and the university’s research security program. Consequential research demands careful governance, and the university’s record, including its oversight of high-containment laboratory work and other restricted and regulated research, demonstrates that rigor and openness can coexist.

Opportunity. National security is one of the largest and most consequential employers of scientists and engineers in the country, and federal programs, from the DoD SMART Scholarship to CyberCorps and Cyber Service Academy, and from national defense graduate fellowships to RISC internships, pay for education in exchange for service in mission agencies and laboratories. WINS works to connect Wisconsin students with those pathways, with internships and research experiences, and with careers where their work matters at national scale.

Partnership. WINS helps researchers find sponsors whose missions need their science and expertise navigate the mechanics of federal engagement, and tell the story of their work’s national impact. Participation is always the researcher’s choice; WINS helps make the choice available and the path navigable.

WINS was established with the support of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and is housed in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. Its programs are supported by a combination of WARF, university, and sponsored funding.

WARF funding will pay for the launch of a new institute for national security to act as the university’s “front door” and clearing house specifically for national security, defense, and intelligence research, coordinating and strategically growing a portfolio of unclassified, dual-use research and development. University governance plays an important role in university decision-making.