VA Attorney General Briefed on ODU Research Initiatives during Campus Visit

July 23, 2014

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring (right) with ODU President John R. Broderick Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring (second from left) with Vice Adm. David Architzel, U.S. Navy (Ret), director of military affairs for ODU (left); Karl Schoenbach, Eminent Scholar emeritus and professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering (second from right) and Elizabeth Kersey, assistant to the president for local, state and federal governmental relations.

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring visited Old Dominion University Wednesday morning and was briefed on two of the university's main research initiatives: climate change/sea level rise and bioelectrics.

While on campus, Herring met with ODU President John R. Broderick as well as Vice Adm. David Architzel, U.S. Navy (Ret), director of military affairs for ODU; Morris Foster, ODU vice president for research; and Karl Schoenbach, Eminent Scholar emeritus and professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering.

Architzel and Foster briefed Herring on the university's Climate Change and Sea Level Rise Initiative (CCSLRI) and related grant opportunities.

ODU has been a hub of research and education in coastal engineering and ocean sciences for decades. But four years ago, Broderick formally launched CCSLRI as a collaborative undertaking of all six of the university's colleges. This initiative also brought together stakeholders from government, industry and environmental groups for workshops with ODU faculty members, and has included several public forums.

Early this summer, ODU hosted "TechSurge - Technical Support for Coastal Resiliency," a first-of-its-kind conference that brought together more than 250 planners from all levels of government and industry to begin work on a local response template to help coastal communities deal with sea level rise. That meeting cast Architzel and others at ODU as leaders of a pilot project, endorsed by the White House, the U.S. Navy and NOAA, to create the response template.

At "TechSurge," ODU announced its new Mitigation and Adaptation Research Institute (MARI), which is designed to be a think tank to develop and support coastal resiliency strategies. On June 30, MARI and ODU hosted another sea level rise public forum, Meeting the Challenge, which was organized by U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine and featured politicians and other opinion leaders from federal, state and local governments.

Herring responded favorably to the information, noting that he believes climate change is real and that "we need to let science inform us on this so we can take action."

Of the ODU initiative, he added: "I think what you are doing is good and important for the region and the state."

The second stop on the campus tour was at the Frank Reidy Research Center for Biolectrics where Schoenbach provided an update on work taking place at the center, which is considered an international leader in exploring the powers of intense, pulsed electromagnetic fields and cold ionized gases to interact with biological systems. Its researchers are developing new medical diagnostics, therapies and environmental decontamination technologies.

"There is great research being done and we need to find ways that, when discoveries are made, jobs are created here in the commonwealth," Herring said of the ODU research and potential for future commercialization.

For more information on the Climate Change and Sea Level Rise Initiative and Bioelectrics research ongoing at Old Dominion University, visit the CCSLRI and Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics websites.