Salt-Water Connection
Professors Are Launching a Multidisciplinary Maritime Consortium

By Brendan O’Hallarn

Just a few years after Wayne Talley joined the faculty at Old Dominion University, the chair of his department in the College of Business and Public Administration asked if there was anyone on the faculty who would like to teach a transportation economics course. “I thought to myself, ‘I worked at a trucking company a few years ago,’” Talley said. “That was where it started.” Thirty-five years later, Talley is an eminent scholar and the Frederick W. Beazley Professor of Economics at ODU. He’s also one of the world’s leading authorities on transportation economics, particularly ports.

Alok Verma arrived from India as an engineer with a specialty in logistics. As his work brought him to Old Dominion, that specialty brought Verma’s work to Virginia’s declining shipbuilding industry. He set about trying to design systems to make the construction of commercial vessels here economical once again. Almost 30 years later, Verma, the Ray Ferrari Professor and director of ODU’s Lean Institute, is leading a $1.3 million initiative to ensure that the rebounding local industry has the qualified workers it needs to stay strong, including designing entire high school instructional units around shipbuilding technology.

Three years ago, ODU’s history department decided to start a Ph.D. program. To differentiate the university from the hundreds of other U.S. schools offering doctoral history programs, a decision was made to tailor the program around maritime history, a doctoral specialty that currently isn’t available anywhere else in the country. The creation of the program required a maritime historian. During his interview in January 2008, German historian Ingo Heidbrink was asked if he was more of an expert in Northern European history or New World history. “No,” Heidbrink replied, arguing he was an expert with regard to the water that ties the two continents together. “That was the answer we were looking for,” said Associate Professor Maura Hametz, and Heidbrink was hired.

Larry Atkinson has been on the faculty in the College of Sciences’ strong Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences since 1985. The work of that department has gained national acclaim “because we’ve worked very hard to find the right people,” said Atkinson, the Samuel and Fay Slover Ocean Professor and eminent scholar. More than 10 years ago, he realized that other faculty members at ODU had been quietly hiring the right people and building expertise in the field of maritime research. “It came down to one thing – we all had to talk to each other,” Atkinson said.

Anchors Aweigh for Collaborations in Maritime Studies

Because of hundreds of those conversations, it’s anchors aweigh. Faculty researchers at ODU are creating the Consortium for Maritime Research (CMR), which will launch collaborative research projects among different disciplines to position ODU as a national leader in the field.

ODU President John Broderick believes the Maritime Research Consortium is an ideal example of ODU demonstrating its knack for collaborative research – using the common element of the salt water surrounding the area to do cutting-edge research.

“The mission of the university says, right at the beginning, that Old Dominion University is located in Hampton Roads, one of the world’s major seaports,” Broderick said. “The school has attracted a diverse collection of maritime experts. It’s to everyone’s benefit if they put their considerable skills together.”

In terms of geography, history, technology and oceanography, the pieces have long been in place.

ODU sits in the middle of one of the world’s most significant ports, which has been a hub of maritime activity since before Europeans arrived in North America. Its shipbuilding industry is one of the region’s biggest employers. Norfolk is home to the world’s largest naval base. And ODU researchers have done innovative work in wind technology and alternative fuels from aquatic sources like algae.

From his position in the economics department, Talley has been working at the idea of the CMR the longest. After doing transportation economics research for a decade, Talley helped create ODU’s first Maritime Institute in 1984. Talley’s research expertise moved into the field of maritime business, especially ports. The institute ended up moving off campus, in part due to its own success.

“In 1987, the governor (Democrat Gerald Baliles) wanted to use it as an economic development center. He moved it to downtown Norfolk,” Talley said. Without the academic links through ODU, the maritime research done by the Maritime Institute petered out.

In 1993, with the blessing of then-ODU President James Koch, Talley formed a second maritime institute, with the formal name of the International Maritime, Ports and Logistics Management Institute. Also, the maritime, ports and logistics management concentration in the master’s programs in business administration and public administration was established, making ODU the only university in the country to provide such a concentration. In 2006, an undergraduate major in maritime and supply change management was added, making ODU one of only two U.S. universities to offer an undergraduate maritime management major.

Four years ago, when discussions began around the idea of a university-wide research consortium, Talley looked outside his college. He’s on the board of the Institute for Ship Maintenance, Repair and Operations in the Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology. He met with candidates for the senior maritime historian position in the history department, to demonstrate how much the school had to offer in terms of collaboration opportunities. And he’s helped on grants submitted by the international studies faculty, and the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering.

Professors Share Salty-Water Interests

“It’s been my vision for some time that we should come to this together,” Talley said.
Atkinson also started looking outside his department a number of years ago. His research into mitigating effects of oil and gas exploration brought him in touch with both energy experts and economists. Many of those experts were at ODU.

“The university has attracted a lot of people that have some sort of salty water interest,” Atkinson said. And the tangible payoff comes in research dollars for collaborative projects. “For us, the coin of the realm is NSF (National Science Foundation) funding. There was a gradual recognition that the more diverse our grant proposals, the more disciplines they involved, the better chance we had.”

One of Atkinson’s colleagues who has been part of maritime consortium planning sessions is Elizabeth Smith, a researcher with ODU’s Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography. She directs the Chesapeake Bay Observing System (CBOS) and is heading up a project for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to develop a unique Chesapeake Bay storm surge prediction system.

Atkinson and Hametz from the College of Arts and Letters, wrote a 2005 memo about creating the CMR, with three goals in mind: facilitating interdisciplinary research in the maritime area, increasing funding for maritime research and increasing faculty positions in all colleges related to maritime research.

Since bi-annual meetings have begun to discuss the CMR, Atkinson has added a fourth goal.

“We need to talk to each other. This consortium isn’t going to be created from the top down; it’s these individual connections made between faculty members in different colleges.”

That communication led to the creation, at one of the monthly meetings, of a proposed “Pillars of Excellence” for a Consortium for Maritime Research. With experts in five ODU colleges, links can be formed over common areas of subject interest such as ports, energy, climate change, fisheries and ship technology.

The history department had a tangible example of what it can provide, when it learned of an engineering study about erosion of the sunken USS Monitor. The research team at the Mariners’ Museum, which included ODU professor of physics Desmond Cook, had been hoping to find someone who could dig up and decipher historical records to figure out where the steel was manufactured. This would help in the corrosion calculations.

“We thought, when we heard about it, ‘Hey, we can do that,’” said Hametz. As a specialist in Italian history, Hametz has frequently looked at history from the water in, as opposed to a perspective from the land out to sea. She found someone with similar interests when the college hired Ingo Heidbrink to help create the doctoral program.

“To me, the two-thirds of the Earth covered by water is more interesting, because we’re still discovering it. It really is the last frontier. It’s natural to try to really understand it,” Heidbrink said. Among his areas of specialty is the history of fishing conflicts in the North Atlantic.

Heidbrink said the United States is actually behind many European countries in creating research centers that think about history in this way. “For so many international projects, we are lacking U.S. partners,” he said.

ODU is stepping into the international maritime history realm in August, when the school hosts the North Atlantic Fisheries History conference, bringing together 50 scholars from around the North Atlantic.

But Heidbrink said the school is pursuing the CMR the right way in not mandating its formation from the top down. That way, research projects will form collaborations more easily and grow the consortium more effectively, he said.

Engineers Come to Aid of Shipbuilding

When Alok Verma arrived at Old Dominion, it was during a period of steep decline in the U.S. shipbuilding industry. “In 1980 and 1981, there was zero commercial shipbuilding in the U.S.,” he said. “The only reason the industry has survived is because of defense contracts.”

In his research in engineering technology, specifically the logistics of efficient manufacturing, Verma attempted to find ways to remove inefficiencies in the ship construction and repair processes.

“Part of the difficulty is that it’s such a cyclical business. A contract for an aircraft carrier may take four years for design and four years for construction. So the business has to go through multiple hiring and layoff cycles.”

Today, the local commercial shipbuilding and ship repair industry has been revived to the degree that industry observers are worried about a shortage of skilled workers in the near future. “Twenty-six percent of employees have 35 or more years of experience. In the next 10 to 15 years, they’ll start retiring,” Verma said.

Last year, Verma received a $1.3 million NSF grant to help tailor science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education around the shipbuilding industry, in an effort to recruit the future workforce essential to this key Hampton Roads industry. He created a shipbuilding and ship repair career day event, which has now been offered two years in a row on the ODU campus. In addition, he designed “Marine Kits” – specialized middle and high school STEM instructional units around the shipbuilding and repair industry.

The grant will also allow Verma and three colleagues from the Darden College of Education — Nina Brown, professor and eminent scholar, and Sueanne McKinney and Daniel Dickerson, assistant professors — to give 60 middle and high school math and science teachers 16-hour summer professional development seminars on how to teach the units.

Verma says other colleges within ODU could join forces and collaborate to address additional workforce, technology development and productivity issues in the marine industry.