Lambton College has launched a new Centre of Excellence in Energy and Bio-Industrial Technologies.
The official announcement was made Thursday afternoon during a community presentation.
The centre is designed to meet the evolving needs of the energy and bio-industrial sector. It focuses on two major streams: education and training, and applied research.
Lambton College President & CEO Judith Morris says it provides students with a stepping stone into the industry.
"In the classroom we have highly qualified personnel, most of our faculty in this area have PhD's, they know the theories," says Morris at Thursday's conference, "and our students take labs, which allows them to apply that work."
"The next step is they apply it in a real world situation."
Two new research centres were announced spread across various college facilities, including the Bio-Industrial Process Research Centre and the Lambton Energy Research Centre.
"It will be bio-technology focused, which will be focusing on taking live feed stock and making various products out of it," says Morris. "It will be on energy, which will focus on renewable types of energy and making blades better for a wind turbine, or solar panels that work better, and geothermal."
"More often, it will be the instrumentation and control of fitting all of those energy systems together so they work as one."
Morris says the centre solidifies their position as a national leader in education, innovation, applied research and new development for process industries.
"Particularly in instrumentation control," says Morris. "There is no research, that we know of, that is happening in instrumentation and control in any other centre."
Lambton College has acquired a total of $15 million dollars in senior government funding, specifically from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE).
This amount of funding comes in addition to the money that will be fronted by industry partners for project proposals.
Launching a Centre of Excellence was one of the six pillars of the college's Strategic Plan. The new centre also incorporates an additional pillar, which focuses on the creation of industry and community partnerships.
