ALABAMA
DOSSIER
WORDS: DANIEL WELLBELOVE
Arsenal and the Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville emerged as a key site in the U.S. efforts to put a man on the moon, led by Wernher von Braun. In 1961, he successfully lobbied for the establishment of a research facility in the city, which served as a predecessor to the science and engineering efforts at what is now the University of Alabama at Huntsville. To this day, the majority of the university’s research funding still
comes from NASA or the Department of Defence, while it serves as the anchor for the technology-focused Cummings Research Park. “We have contractual relationships with a number of companies in the research park,” says UAH president Robert Altenkirch, whose university ranks fourth nationally for aeronautical and astronautical engineering. “For example, we worked on the mirrors that go on the James Webb Space Telescope, which was under Ball Aerospace. These projects are sometimes very large and there’ll be a number of entities working on them, and o en we’re one of them.” The state’s growth in tech jobs is also good news for students at the University of North Alabama, which is opening its $39.7-million Science and Technology Building for the fall semester, with new programs such as engineering technology. “I think every one of those graduates will have multiple job offers by the time they walk out, because of the booming economy of North Alabama,” says president Kenneth Ki s. Elsewhere, Vulcan Materials was founded in 1909 as the Birmingham Slag Company, and has since grown to be the nation’s largest aggregates producer. It reported total revenue of nearly $3 billion in 2014 as it serves a footprint that includes 18 of the 25 fastest-growing metro areas in the U.S. A quarter of its business comes from highway construction, and so the company is nicely poised as the U.S. looks to rebuild its road network. “It’s so important for our country to allow people and services to get to market and to get there economically, and it’s a ma er of national defense,” says president and CEO J. Thomas Hill. “We
literally build the foundation that all that infrastructure is built upon.” Meanwhile, Energen has developed a significant presence across southern America, following its transition from a gas utility to pure-play exploration and production. The company completed its transformation with the sale of Alagasco for $1.6 billion in 2014, which has helped it navigate the current low-commodityprice environment. “We focused in what we think is one of the best oils basins in the United States, the Permian Basin of West Texas,” says chairman and CEO James McManus. “We now have a very deep drilling inventory, with almost 5,600 unrisked locations. And the company’s balance sheet is underleveraged, so even though we’ve gone into an oil price decline, the company is in good shape to be able to weather that storm.” Alabama’s influence also stretches to sports and entertainment. Muscle Shoals rewrote the American songbook in the 1960s and 70s, while the Southeastern Conference has been headquartered in Birmingham since 1948. In addition to its 200-plus national championships, the SEC’s presence can be seen in close to 65 million homes across the country though the SEC Network, and then throughout the world as its members continue to a ract foreign students. “The impact on our communities, the states, our region, our nation, and in many ways the world, that comes from our campuses is incredible when you start to look at the global spectrum of what we do, and at the individual people that come through our universities,” says Greg Sankey, who takes over as SEC commissioner in August.
E V E R Y Y E A R , E N E R G E N S P O N S O R S A N A R T C O M P E T I T I O N AT I T S B I R M I N G H A M H Q , D I S P L AY I N G A R O U N D 2 0 0 P A I N T I N G S B Y A L A B A M A A R T I S T S . F R O M I T S 3 3 5 Q U A R R I E S , V U L C A N M AT E R I A L S S E R V E S M A R K E T S I N 2 0 S TAT E S , T H E D I S T R I C T O F C O L U M B I A , M E X I C O A N D T H E B A H A M A S . HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM/DOSSIER
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