Senator Richard Shelby and his wife Annette Shelby’s names have been on Shelby Hall since 2004. This year, they lent their faces to a commemorative pillar guarding the sidewalk en route to their namesake building.
Senator Shelby, first elected to Congress in 1978, is the vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and its Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies. Now, his influence on The University of Alabama System is commemorated in the pillar, building and fountain at the new engineering complexes.
“Senator Richard Shelby has played a vital role in helping our three campuses become national front-runners in scientific research and development,” said UA System Chancellor Robert Witt. “To be a top-tier competitor for grants and contracts, as well as for premier students and faculty, a university must have state-of-the-art laboratories and research centers. Senator Shelby clearly understands the direct link between university research and economic development, and his efforts on our behalf are having a direct impact on job creation and on the well-being of Alabama’s citizens.”
A strong education, with “world-class math, science and engineering facilities” at Alabama universities would help state residents find and create high-quality, skilled jobs, Shelby said.
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This is a major draw for global companies who seek to do business in America. Companies like Mercedes, Airbus, Toyota, Honda and Hyundai want to locate talent from these pools, he said.
“We want to keep this job creation going and take it to the next level, and that’s why education has been a main focus of my career in the U.S. Senate,” Shelby said. “It’s all about opportunities for the people of Alabama – now and well into the future.”
For the Tuscaloosa campus, Shelby helped secure federal funding to construct the Engineering Quad and Shelby Hall. In Birmingham, he contributed to biomedical research at UAB, sparked in part by their treatment of Annette Shelby’s lupus. The UAB interdisciplinary biomedical research building bears their names.
UAB President Ray Watts said Shelby is an important champion in Washington, D.C., for education during a time when research funding is choked by sequestration, among other things.
“Because of Senator Shelby and others like him who support leading-edge research for life-saving and improving advancements, UAB was awarded more than $190 million last year by the National Institutes of Health,” Watts said. “This support consistently positions UAB as one of the top 12 NIH-funded public research institutions in the country, which influences UAB’s annual economic impact exceeding $5 billion in Alabama.”
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For UAH, Shelby secured funding for a building with multiple research centers and academic departments. That building is also named for him. UAH President Robert Altenkirch said Shelby’s support of their research programs have helped the institution in ranking and achieving several research milestones.
“Senator Richard Shelby has been a leading advocate for The University of Alabama in Huntsville for many years. He described UAH as the MIT of the South, and has been instrumental in creating that vision with his long-time support of the campus,” Altenkirch said.
Shelby said he has focused on STEM education because of global competition in hard sciences and engineering.
“World class educations in math, science, and engineering are critical to the ability of our young people to compete and win in today’s global economy,” Shelby said. “We don’t want to merely adapt to the next wave of technological progress; we want to be in the vanguard of it.”
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