The US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee last week signed a 'mentor–protégé agreement' with Jackson State University (JSU) in Mississippi. As part of the three-year commitment, ORNL will serve as mentor to the entire school, and collaborations will be forged across research sectors common to the pair. ORNL will be able to award non-competitive subcontracts, or form collaborations to submit funding proposals to other agencies.

ORNL, which made a similar agreement with Morehouse College in Georgia last year, is the first national science laboratory to forge collaborative agreements with historically black institutes.

“If we can help our subcontractors find synergies with our researchers, better understand our contracting mechanisms and learn to draft solid proposals, they'll be better partners,” says Will Minter, director of ORNL's small-business programmes.

Although the JSU agreement is new, the two institutions already have collaborations in computational chemistry, homeland security, biological sciences and nanomaterials. JSU computational chemist Jerzy Leszczynski has worked with ORNL researchers on carbon nanostructures. His project is one of several that should grow with larger funds from ORNL in the future. “We're not expecting Oak Ridge to give us a $10-million cheque. We want the opportunity to grow our strong programmes,” says Rita Presley, JSU's associate vice-president for research and sponsored programmes. Presley hopes a strong relationship with ORNL will help JSU secure more mainstream funding, not necessarily money set aside for historically black institutes.

Morehouse College administrators say that access to ORNL equipment, such as its supercomputing capabilities, will soon help them to do research with a national scope. Noting that ORNL's biofuels research is looking at cellulose conversion, James Brown, director of Morehouse's Office of Research Careers, contacted Duane Jackson, who studies termites — efficient cellulose converters. Jackson is now working with a Morehouse chemist and botanist to identify useful termite gut enzymes, which will feed into ORNL's biofuels work.

ORNL continues to seek partners eager to forge research partnerships. Minter says that other national labs seem interested in tracking the progress of ORNL's collaborations. “This programme is an experiment, but that's what labs do,” he says.