The start of a new era

Where is Virginia Tech? The answer is more expansive than you might think. Virginia Tech is in Blacksburg, but also in Roanoke, Richmond, and across the commonwealth. It’s in Riva San Vitale, Switzerland; India; Africa; and every location in between where Virginia Tech students learn and university research takes place.

This spring, Virginia Tech launched a new era with the long-anticipated opening of its new academic building in Alexandria. An epicenter for technology, education, and research in the heart of the greater Washington, D.C., metro area’s innovation economy, Virginia Tech’s newest location will expand the possibilities of where and how students, alumni, and the world can connect with the university.

The new 11-story, 300,000-square-foot structure along the shores of the Potomac River has the potential to connect VirginiaTech both institutionally and physically through the university’s growing network of innovation.

More than five decades ago, Virginia Tech established a foothold in Northern Virginia beginning its operations out of a Reston farmhouse. Since then, the university has continued to expand throughout the region and now offers more than 45 graduate degree and certificate programs in the greater D.C. area.

Today, more than 60,000 Hokie alumni also call the region home.

Operating in close proximity to and connecting with government and industry drives transformational change. It opens a multifaceted network of possibilities for what the university is and can become as Virginia Tech extends its presence and reach. In so doing, Virginia Tech is also innovating the very idea of what a land-grant university can and should be in the 21st century.

But even as the global workforce harnesses the benefits of technological connectivity, those developments also showcase the value of face-to-face human interaction — a crucial component for Virginia Tech working with partners in the greater D.C. area.

Recognizing the value of Virginia Tech’s expanding presence at the nexus of academia, industry, and government in elevating the university’s role as a leading global research institution, Sands and Executive Vice President and Provost Cyril Clarke launched the Northern Virginia Steering Committee in 2023. Its charge: develop a strategy, organizational structure, and holistic approach for Virginia Tech in the D.C. area.

The steering committee engaged stakeholders across the region, through town halls and focus groups, to determine educational opportunities, evaluate the potential for research and partnerships, and discover ways to convene communities to build a culture of innovation.

Julia Ross, the Paul and Dorothea Torgersen Dean of Engineering and head of the Northern Virginia Steering Committee, also initiated conversations with programs from Blacksburg to develop networking opportunities and encourage research collaborations, using the spaces available in the new location to forge new connections.

“We’re building not just unique research capabilities, but also convening spaces and capabilities that we didn’t have before that are going to benefit us universitywide,” said Ross. A new initiative for smart construction that will support research in Northern Virginia and Blacksburg will occupy 40,000 square feet on the ground floor of the new headquarters for HITT Contracting that is slated to open in Falls Church in 2027. The National Security Institute continues to grow and expand its footprint across the Commonwealth.

And there are further partnerships blooming, like the one with Children’s National Hospital, combining novel technologies and therapies for treating pediatric patients with devastating diagnoses like brain tumors.

“Our partners’ first engagement with us might be in the region, because that’s where they see us or bump into us,” said Ross. “But then, in meaningful ways, those engagements will translate to other parts of the university, including Blacksburg and other places around the commonwealth.”

Looking out the windows of Virginia Tech’s gleaming new academic building at the Capitol Building and Potomac River, the location and its purpose become crystal clear.

And all that glass, amid the striking design from Hokie graduate Sven Shockey, offers a literal window into what’s happening inside, also.

“We tried to push ourselves to think about how we can differentiate what we do, how we can stand out in the crowd, and how we can do that in a way that really plays to our strengths and values, in a way that’s authentic to Virginia Tech,” said Ross.

The result of that thinking is a project-based learning curriculum that challenges students with real-world problems brought to them by outside partners. And the campus’s core research areas comprise vital computer science and engineering disciplines in artificial intelligence, quantum information science, intelligent interfaces, and next-generation wireless technology to prepare students for the jobs of tomorrow. To that end, the new innovation and research center is also home to graduate programs in the Pamplin College of Business.

“You’ve got the largest consumer of technology on the planet, in close proximity to the companies that produce that technology, now in close proximity to our building,” said Innovation Campus Vice President and Executive Director Lance Collins. “It’s just an incredibly rich environment.”

Elsa Gonzalez-Aguilar, Britney Aiken, and Ramin Roughani may not, at first glance, appear to have too much in common.

But despite very different upbringings, each eventually found their way to both Virginia Tech and the Washington D.C. area.

Through their lived experience, each shows in their own way the importance of and commitment to lifelong learning, in and out of the classroom, that exemplifies the potential of Virginia Tech’s growing innovation network.

Growing up between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, Gonzalez- Aguilar M.S. ’24 knew she wanted to do something in computer science from the moment her middle school teacher opened up a Linux terminal in class and showed what was possible.

In 2019, after graduating from the University of Texas at El Paso, Gonzalez-Aguilar, moved to the D.C. area to work for Leidos, an innovation company rapidly addressing the world’s most vexing challenges in national security and health. In 2022, she enrolled in the Master of Engineering program at Virginia Tech.

“My family has always put a big emphasis on higher education, and I knew that having a master’s would also open more doors for me and help me advance further in my career,” she said.

For Aiken, who lives in Ashburn, Virginia, learning that Virginia Tech’s new campus would offer a master’s program with a concentration in artificial intelligence was a game-changer. Aiken shared her perspective at an event held to celebrate the opening of Virginia Tech’s new building in Alexandria in February.

Aiken was enjoying a peaceful stroll with her dog, Turbo, one morning, when they were interrupted by a parade of construction trucks. As they followed the convoy to its destination, she realized what they were building.

“I saw that Virginia Tech, the Virginia Tech, was building a campus right here in Northern Virginia,” Aiken said. “At the time, I was already considering a master’s degree. Once I saw that they were offering a concentration in artificial intelligence, I knew then that this was the program for me.”Aiken, who is employed full time as a systems development engineer at Amazon Web Services, applied for admission the very next semester. Although she considered the part-time degree option, she ultimately chose to pursue the program full time.

“I didn’t want to wait,” Aiken said. “I wanted to be on the leading edge of technology now, not three years from now. With advancements in artificial intelligence happening every few weeks, it seems, I knew that the computational renaissance was not going to wait for me.”

Aiken was named one of six Boeing Scholars when she matriculated into the Master of Engineering program in 2023, an opportunity that she says connected her to industry leaders, provided firsthand insight into the aerospace sector, and reinforced the importance of collaboration between academia and industry.

“The rigorous coursework and hands-on learning equipped me with the skills I apply in my current role on Amazon Web Services’ artificial intelligence and machine learning team,” said Aiken. “My time at Virginia Tech didn’t just prepare me for a job—it prepared me to take on challenges and to solve problems that did not exist before.”

By being open-minded and embracing unexpected challenges, Roughani B.S. ’20, M.S. ’24 found his own way through Virginia Tech in the D.C. area. Originally from Iran, Roughani moved to Fairfax, Virginia with his family in 2012. After one year at NOVA Community College, he’s been a student at Virginia Tech since 2016.

Roughani earned a bachelor’s in industrial and systems engineering in 2020 and initially pursued a Ph.D., before transitioning into a master’s program, which better served his career goals. Roughani and his fellow classmates participated in project-based learning last year, jumping at the opportunity to work on an inventory monitoring problem from the Marine Corps Community Services (MCCS). Roughani appreciated the hands-on professional development in the challenges the problem offered.

“I’ve worked on a lot of different projects during my education, but most of them were focused on the empirical and educational side of the project,” said Roughani. “Virginia Tech helped me to experience broader concepts to better understand what might be needed in my future career.”

Andre Vieira is a business intelligence manager with MCCS and was the liaison in charge of communicating with and guiding the students as they worked on solutions. While the outcomes the teams would eventually submit were certainly valuable, Vieira was at least as concerned with the process and what he and MCCS could learn about the students under their charge.

“We are not only interested in implementing the students’ results for the problems, but also in creating a connection for quality people and quality resources,” he said.

That pipeline has produced immediate results. The organization is hoping to implement some of the students’ solutions when their budget and technology allows. But in the meantime, following the 2024 spring semester, MCCS was looking for a new hire.

Roughani knew he wanted to work in data science and had been applying for other jobs as he approached graduation. And even though he’d never heard of MCCS before his project-based learning experience, he knew instantly that it was the opportunity and culture fit he was seeking.

“When you see that you are doing something that makes other people’s lives better, when you are not only focused on the business side of the work, but on the moral side of the work, it feels really good,” said Roughani of his work at MCCS. “You can actually see the impact of the work that you are doing on other peoples’ lives.”

MCCS hired Roughani in August,and thus began his professional life in Northern Virginia. Like Gonzalez-Aguilar and Aiken, he’s the living embodiment of the tech talent pipeline that Virginia Tech is building as it expands its innovation network, one which will fortify its connections to industry and government in and around Washington, D.C. in the 21st century.

Their success stories are emblematic of the kinds of meaningful, lifelong relationships to learning — beyond simple business transactions — that the university can help its students forge in their time on campus and beyond.