UNLV Wins NASA Fiscal Year 2016 Small Business Industry Award T E L E DY N E B R OW N A N D U N LV R E C O G N I Z E D FO R C O M B I N E D E F FO R T AT M A R S H A L L S PAC E F L I G H T C E N T E R
Earlier this year NASA announced the winners of its Fiscal Year 2016 Small Business Industry Awards at its Washington headquarters, naming UNLV and Teledyne Brown Engineering as the winner of the Mentor-Protégé Agreement of the Year award for their partnership. UNLV placed students in the NASA mentor-protégé program following a signed agreement in 2015 with Teledyne Brown Engineering, a U.S. government space and defense contractor. The 12-month workplace experience was the first between a Marshall Space Flight Center prime contractor and a minority-serving institution (UNLV). Through this agreement, students from the College of Engineering, College of Education and College of Fine Arts participated in developing multi-media training for International Space Station (ISS) Payload Ground Support Personnel and Payload Developers.
The 12-month workplace experience was the first between a Marshall Space Flight Center prime contractor and a minority-serving institution.
Although the program originally called for only computer science students, UNLV created a unique, interdisciplinary model to ensure the success of the team and project. This included incorporating a graphic design student and an education postdoctoral student, who is overseeing the project and efficacy of the training modules, onto the team. The postdoc is based on-site allowing for constant face-to-face interaction with the client while the other students are able to work remotely, enabling them to continue their studies and reducing project cost. The partnership with Teledyne Brown has allowed UNLV to gain valuable past performance, and opened up opportunities for support on other NASA contracts. It also provided UNLV underlying knowledge that will assist with writing proposals that are needed to sponsor experiments onboard the ISS. As a result of this successful collaboration, one UNLV student joined the Mission Operations and Integration team full-time, and a sub-contract was extended to UNLV to continue the productive partnership.
View a video at: http://tinyurl.com/UNLVNASA.
For more information visit: Fiscal Year 2016 Small Business Industry Awards at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/fiscal-year-2016-small-business-industry-award-winners
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