Small businesses invited to join Fermilab to discuss partnership opportunities on March 14
Registration is now open for Fermilab’s 2018 Small Business Fair, to be held on March 14. Representatives from local small businesses are invited to discuss opportunities to strengthen relationships between the lab and the local business community.
The half-day session (8 a.m. to noon) will be hosted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Local businesses will be made aware of opportunities to bid for subcontracts for work on Fermilab projects and will be connected to key people at the lab who can guide them through those opportunities.
“Our success at this event would mean awarding future subcontracts to small businesses from connections made at the fair,” said Jane Graves, procurement administrator and event chair.
In the long term, she said, Fermilab aims to increase access to opportunities with the private sector, especially local and small businesses.
Fermilab generates millions in economic output for the state of Illinois each year and supports thousands of jobs. Projects such as the Illinois Accelerator Research Center create partnership and job opportunities across the state and will create more as an incubator for technology companies.
In addition, attendees will be able to learn more about how they can access Fermilab’s unique technologies, capabilities and facilities to create potentially game-changing innovations. Through Fermilab’s Partnerships and Technology Transfer program, industry partners are able to license Fermilab patented and copyrighted technologies; use unique facilities and technical services through Strategic Partnership Projects (SPP) agreements; or participate in joint research through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA).
Fermilab’s long history of making its technology available started in 1946, when its first director, Robert Wilson, proposed using particle accelerators to treat cancer. This was made a reality when, in 1990, Fermilab installed the first proton therapy accelerator in the United States at the Loma Linda University Medical Center in California.
Fermilab leaders hope to strengthen relationships with local and businesses, ensuring that local companies can benefit from the infrastructure and technology created for the laboratory’s research.
Registration is open until March 2. Please visit events.fnal.gov/smallbusiness to apply, and contact Jane Graves at 630-840-4194 or jgraves@fnal.gov with questions about registration.
Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC, a joint partnership between the University of Chicago and the Universities Research Association Inc. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @Fermilab.
The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.