The Universities Research Association (URA) is a non-profit association of more than 90 research universities, primarily but not exclusively in the United States. It has members also in Japan, Italy, and the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1965 at the behest of the President's Science Advisory Committee and the National Academy of Sciences to build and operate Fermilab, a National Accelerator Laboratory.
Contents
History
The President's Science Advisory Committee and a sister group of the United States Atomic Energy Commission joined forces in 1962 to "assess the future needs in high-energy accelerator physics." The panel's recommendations, issued in 1963, included the need to immediately commence design and construction on 200 GeV proton accelerators. An additional recommendation called for a new administrative construct.
On January 17, 1965, the National Academy of Sciences addressed the last recommendation by sponsoring a meeting of presidents from 25 research universities to discuss the management of the accelerator facility that would later become the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). The meeting eventually resulted in the decision to form the Universities Research Association, with 34 original members, to build and manage the new accelerator facility. URA filed its articles of incorporation on June 21, 1965. J. C. Warner, president of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, served as URA's first president.
Projects
URA has helped develop the Tevatron at Fermilab. Its early activities are related to the Superconducting Supercollider, the Pierre Auger Observatory, the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF), and the associated Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), and involvement in the Honeywell International-led National Technology and Engineering Solutions at Sandia (NTESS) that manages and operates Sandia National Laboratories. Current major projects of the association include supporting Fermilab through a partnership with the University of Chicago and coordinating U.S. support of the Pierre Auger Cosmic Observatory.
Members
United States
University of Alabama
Arizona State University
University of Arizona
California Institute of Technology
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Davis
University of California, Irvine
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Riverside
University of California, San Diego
University of California, Santa Barbara
Stanford University
Colorado State University
University of Colorado Boulder
Yale University
Florida State University
University of Florida
Georgia Institute of Technology
University of Chicago
Illinois Institute of Technology
University of Illinois at Chicago
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Northern Illinois University
Italy
University of Pisa
Japan
Waseda University
United Kingdom
University College London
University of Edinburgh
University of Liverpool
University of Manchester