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FOCUS facilities for in-line sensors or flow cells. "It requires some champions on site," says Gene Coffey, Savannah River National Laboratory's representative to CPAC. "You need some support or at least someone to shield them while they are initially floundering around." CPAC hopes to provide some of that support. "I view it [CPAC] as a source of ideas that have to be taken by us, developed, and applied to our needs," explains Ernie Baughman, Amoco's CPAC representative. "CPAC fills a unique niche." Establishing CPAC required the efforts and ultimately the financial support of many institutions and businesses. The initial development was underwritten by a National Science Foundation (NSF) planning grant, with additional support from the University of Washington. The planning study conducted with these funds, under the coordination of Illman, helped to shape CPAC and identify the companies and laboratories that would become its constituency. Thus when CPAC was formally launched in 1984, it was funded with a five-year $550 000 NSF center grant and had 21 industrial and government sponsors. According to Kowalski, it was one of NSF's most successful center startups. CPAC at that point made a strategic decision with respect to marketing the center. Says Kowalski, "We spent most of our effort on obtaining research results." The research effort set the tone for CPAC, although it meant that it would be years before some companies "discovered" the center. Today, CPAC runs financially on its own although some NSF funds are used for specific programs such as visits by scientists from other institutions or graduate student training. The bulk of CPAC's research funds comes from about 50 sponsors who pay an annual membership fee that this year increased from $30 000 to $35 000. ("That," says Kowalski, "was done by the sponsors!") The university supplies additional operational support. The sponsors represent a diverse collection of companies t h a t include chemical, pharmaceutical, and instrument manufacturers; aerospace firms; petroleum companies; and food suppliers. In addition, the U.S. Air Force, Battelle's Pacific Northwest Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Westinghouse-run Savannah River National Laboratory have joined CPAC. In return for their support, sponsors gain an inside track on CPAC research. Research activities are regularly communicated through publications and
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CPAC's semiannual meetings. Sponsors learn about embryonic and continuing research at the university, and they have an opportunity to influence the direction of research projects. For instance, sponsors interested in flowinjection analysis encouraged Jaromir Ruzicka and Gary Christian to develop the technique to handle solutions with particulates, high salt concentrations, and nonaqueous solvents. Sponsors are also invited to visit research laboratories and to send their own scientists to work with CPAC scientists. Furthermore, members can make appointments for CPAC faculty to visit their sites. Equally important, sponsors are promised access to CPAC inventions, software, and patents. Patents arising from CPAC-funded research are available to sponsors through a nonexclusive, royalty-free license for in-house use. Additionally, sponsors review research papers based on CPAC-funded research prior to publication, and a sponsor can delay publication for up to one year to study potential patent applications from the work. Because the university holds title to the intellectual property, commercial use of patents would engender a negotiated royalty payment. Have sponsors gotten their money's worth from this arrangement? "Yes, definitely," states Baughman. "It is hard to quantitate," says Alan Ullman of Procter & Gamble, "but there are tangible things we can show." Most sponsors are reluctant to give specific details. However, from conversations with representatives of various companies, it appears t h a t one of CPAC's most successful "products" to date has been chemometrics software, such as the partial least-squares multicomponent analysis program, from Kowalski's group. In turn, Kowalski credits CPAC with some of the software's success. When he and former graduate student David Veltkamp developed the software, they decided to "make it a little better than a thesis project," according to Kowalski. Their discussions with sponsors about real-world problems associated with multivariate analysis—the statistical handling of several chemical and physical properties—helped to shape the software. The resulting program has been so successful that it has actually been used to control processes. "We never intended it to go that far," says Kowalski. At the annual spring meeting, CPAC's principal investigators present research ideas that are evaluated by designated technical monitors from sponsoring organizations who are fa-
