A newly formed consortium led by RTI International and involving more than 25 North Carolina-based academic, industry, nonprofit, and state government organizations will bring together expertise from a variety of fields to provide the Department of Defense with world-class human performance solutions (DoD).
The North Carolina Center for Optimizing Military Performance, or NC-COMP, will focus on developing solutions for injury prevention and recovery, maintaining performance in multi-stressor conditions, and improving baseline physical and mental performance.
“It is critical to consider how physical, cognitive, and psychological health factors influence the overall well-being of Service members to optimize military performance,” said Dennis McGurk, Ph.D., an expert in military medical research and development at RTI who served in the US Army for more than 25 years. “After all, Servicemembers face a great deal of stress at home, during training, and on deployments, and how they deal with those stressors has a direct impact on mission effectiveness.”
“As a former Special Operations Soldier and medical officer, I’m keenly aware of the challenges our great nation’s warriors face in combat,” said Stephen DeLellis, PA-C, retired Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army and executive director of the Fort Bragg Research Institute (FBRI), a collaborative effort between Womack Army Medical Center, Fort Bragg, and The Geneva Foundation. “NC-COMP offers commanders a whole host of capabilities to create solutions to meet those needs, not only for today’s warfighter but for the future fight as well. As a proud founding member of this collaborative, we are focused on producing effective, evidence-based solutions to support the gaps, needs and requirements of our nation’s warfighters.”
The launch of NC-COMP follows a study conducted last year by RTI on behalf of the Defense Alliance of North Carolina, which found that North Carolina is a market with significant growth potential for defence contracts and is one of the fastest-growing states in the country for technology areas targeted by the Department of Defense.
NC-COMP will engage with outside consortia and DoD organizations to give unprecedented access to best-in-breed technologies and services, in addition to pooling resources from member organizations.
The North Carolina Biotechnology Center’s Mary Beth Thomas, senior vice president of science and business development, said, “One of the benefits of working with NC-COMP is the diverse array of partners who have signed on to work toward developing solutions to address the human performance challenges faced by our Service members.” “They offer not only a diverse set of skills and knowledge, but also a deliberate desire to collaborate in order to get potential answers into the hands of our Service members.”
