Impact on a Changing World: RTI International at 50
Chapter 1: Improving the Human Condition
Over five decades, RTI has carried out more than 10,000 projects for hundreds of government and private-sector clients around the globe. More than 3,800 people working for RTI are now engaged in more than 1,000 projects in more than 40 countries.
On a 180-acre campus in the eastern Piedmont of North Carolina, at the center of a triangle formed by the locations of its three founding universities, resides one of the world's leading research institutes.
Fifty years ago, at the institute's founding, the land was barren, comprising scrub pine and open fields. Much the same could be said of the region's economy, mired in postwar industrial and agricultural decline. In an effort to improve the region's financial health and stop a "brain drain" of smart, talented people leaving for jobs elsewhere, North Carolina business leaders, government officials, and academicians proposed a radical idea: build a new business park, with a research institute as the centerpiece; over time, these would grow, drawing jobs and prosperity to a place seriously in need of both. Research Triangle Park and, within its embrace, the Research Triangle Institute were born at the end of 1958.
50 Years of Growth
A half-century later, the region's economy is among the nation's most vibrant, and the institute—trade-named RTI International in 2002—has undergone tremendous growth and had an ever more profound impact on making the world a better place to live.
Statistical sciences formed the core of RTI's original competence, its first contract calling for an analysis of morbidity data from Tennessee. Since then, its history has mirrored changes in national—and increasingly global—attitudes and priorities, and RTI has undergone a series of significant transformations. On the heels of President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" and a new social conscience in the United States, RTI expanded its work in the social sciences in the 1960s. Reagan-era cuts in quality-of-life programs and an emphasis on defense in the 1980s led RTI more deeply into research in technology, health care, space, and cultural aspects of the military.
While involved in the environmental movement from the beginning, RTI rode a wave of new environmental and health consciousness into extensive research on air and water pollution and toxicology in the 1990s. By the end of the decade, the trend toward globalization had become unstoppable, and—as the world continues to "shrink," its people and systems increasingly interdependent—international work has been RTI's fastest-growing area since 1999.
Over five decades, RTI has carried out more than 10,000 projects for hundreds of government and private-sector clients around the globe. More than 3,800 people working for RTI are now engaged in more than 1,000 projects in more than 40 countries. They conduct a remarkable depth and breadth of scientific inquiry and statistical analysis—in fields as varied as agriculture, economics, education, government, health, public policy, technology, energy, the environment, medicine, electronics, and transportation. Diverse as they may be, these projects have one thing in common—a long-held mission to improve the human condition.
A Multidisciplinary Approach to Research
RTI's success, growth, impact, and ever-increasing scientific stature are attributable to its ability to leverage a cross-disciplinary approach to science. Researchers hold advanced degrees in more than 125 disciplines; their collaborative expertise is recruited to better understand, analyze, measure, and solve many of the most complex challenges to the planet and humankind.
Health research, RTI's largest field of study, spans a range of specialties from the human genome to global health education. Researchers across the institute are studying substance abuse among teenagers, the relationship between children's television viewing and obesity, and the health implications of the dietary supplement ephedra. Others are evaluating the prevalence of sexual assault among prison inmates and the relationship between hypothermia and infants with encephalopathy.
While one multidisciplinary team of researchers recently forged a unique private-public partnership to bring an affordable new tuberculosis drug—PA-824—to clinical trials, another group developed a data-mining and predictive analytics software program to help police forces optimize their resources to improve public safety.
Other teams have searched for ways to cost-effectively expedite drug discovery and development; examined the health impact of trichloroethylene, a common industrial and dry cleaning solvent; studied the absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of drugs in animal models to assist in the development of effective new treatments for AIDS and other diseases; and examined misoprostol, a drug normally used to treat ulcers.
In other areas, RTI is developing algorithms to translate e-mails from one language into another and working on strategies to improve the federal Upward Bound program for disadvantaged high schoolers. Additional projects are aimed at cleaner energy, more effective government in developing nations, better education, and more productive technology. The fruit of this work is the material upon which public policies are made to improve education, the environment, health care, and other daunting human and planetary issues.
What differentiates RTI from other research institutes is that, on nearly every project for every client, RTI applies its world-class knowledge and expertise from multiple domains to achieve a broader perspective on the world's most vexing problems—and then works toward greater understanding of those problems and more imaginative solutions to them. This important distinction, coupled with RTI's mission of improving the human condition, has made RTI a unique and rewarding place to work for some of the world's most esteemed scientists. They are drawn by the freedom to pursue high-profile and high-impact research projects in the service of humanity—alongside peers from other scientific disciplines and often in collaboration with researchers from the institute's three founding universities.
RTI's Leadership and Mission
For the past nine years, Victoria Franchetti Haynes, Ph.D., has been at the helm of RTI International. The institute's third president, Haynes is a chemist by training and has spent much of her career in the private sector. She has sharpened the mission of RTI, emphasizing the role of strategic planning, and—in an echo of the strategy by which RTI's founding president built the institute's first renowned staff—has made explicit an effort to further elevate the institute's scientific stature. Haynes also has fostered a more entrepreneurial spirit institute-wide. For the first time in its history, for example, RTI has spun off promising technologies for commercialization and has made acquisitions to bolster its capabilities and intellectual capital. RTI also has furthered its global reach. Haynes presides over an organization that brims with innovation to address diverse global, regional, and national challenges. As she puts it, "We pretty much cover the scientific waterfront."
When large-scale disasters such as hurricanes or oil spills have threatened life, RTI has been there to assist. When developing countries have needed help creating local democratic governance or building a modern public service infrastructure or education system, RTI has helped plot a course. When countries have agonized over social ills such as alcohol or drug abuse, RTI has been there to shed light on the nature of the problem and ways to solve it. When human life has been undermined by disease, RTI has been there, working on prevention or a cure.
Whenever headlines focus attention on a major national or worldwide issue, chances are that RTI is there, improving understanding and working on a solution. At RTI, this is science with a purpose—driven by a principled mission of asserting the dignity and improving the condition of humankind.