Virginia Tech — the only Virginia university among the nation’s top 50 research institutes — is home to more than 2,000 faculty and 6,000 graduate students, 1,400 of them engaged in IT-related research and development.

Each year hundreds of companies — from hungry start-ups to the household-names — come to Virginia Tech to generate intellectual property (IP), gauge the industry’s future, train their technology workers, and recruit Virginia Tech students.

During the 1980s, Virginia Tech became

• the first Southern university on BITNET, a forerunner to the Internet.
• the first university to provide student and faculty access to supercomputing.
• a pioneer in wireless and fiber-optic communications.

During the 1990s, Virginia Tech became

• part of the nation’s first public-access e-community.
• the first university to own broadband spectrum.
• a leading Internet2 collaborator.
• an emerging leader in bioinformatics.
• the first university to require electronic theses and dissertations.