Research Triangle Institute, trading as RTI International, is a
nonprofit organization
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
headquartered in the
Research Triangle Park in
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and So ...
. RTI provides research and technical services. It was founded in 1958 with $500,000 in funding from local businesses and the three North Carolina universities that form the
Research Triangle
The Research Triangle, or simply The Triangle, are both common nicknames for a metropolitan area in the Piedmont region of North Carolina in the United States, anchored by the cities of Raleigh and Durham and the town of Chapel Hill, home to ...
. RTI research has covered topics like HIV/AIDS, healthcare, education curriculum and the environment, among others. The
US Agency for International Development
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government that is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. With a budget of over $27 bil ...
accounts for about 35 percent of RTI's research revenue.
History
![RTP planning](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/RTP_planning.jpg)
In 1954 a building contractor, met with the North Carolina state treasurer and the president of
Wachovia
Wachovia was a diversified financial services company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Before its acquisition by Wells Fargo and Company in 2008, Wachovia was the fourth-largest bank holding company in the United States, based on total asset ...
to discuss building a research park in North Carolina to attract new industries to the region.
They obtained support for the concept from state governor
Luther Hodges
Luther Hartwell Hodges (March 9, 1898October 6, 1974) was a businessman and American politician. After a career in textile manufacturing, he entered public service, gaining some state appointments. Elected as lieutenant governor of North Carolin ...
and the three universities that form the
research triangle
The Research Triangle, or simply The Triangle, are both common nicknames for a metropolitan area in the Piedmont region of North Carolina in the United States, anchored by the cities of Raleigh and Durham and the town of Chapel Hill, home to ...
:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States ...
,
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...
and
North Carolina State University
North Carolina State University (NC State) is a public land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in 1887 and part of the University of North Carolina system, it is the largest university in the Carolinas. The universit ...
.
The Research Triangle Institute (now RTI International) was formed by the park's founders as the research park's first tenant in 1958.
The following January they announced that $1.425 million had been raised by the Research Triangle Foundation to fund the park and that $500,000 of it had been set aside for RTI International.
RTI started with three divisions: Isotope Development, Operational Sciences and Statistics Research.
Its first contract was a $4,500 statistical study of morbidity data from
Tennessee
Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to th ...
.
In RTI's first year of operation, it had 25 staff and $240,000 in research contracts.
Its early work was focused on statistics, but within a few years RTI expanded into radioisotopes, organic chemistry and polymers. In 1960 the Institute had its first international research contract for an agricultural census in
Nigeria
Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...
.
RTI won contracts with the
Department of Education
An education ministry is a national or subnational government agency politically responsible for education. Various other names are commonly used to identify such agencies, such as Ministry of Education, Department of Education, and Ministry of Pub ...
,
Defense Department,
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...
and the
Atomic Energy Commission, growing to $3.4 million in contracts in 1964 and $85 million in 1988.
In 1971, RTI's staff of 430 was reorganized into four research groups: social and economic systems, statistical sciences, environmental sciences and engineering, and chemistry and life sciences. It also created a division for education called the Center for Education Research and Evaluation.
Four years later, RTI created the Office for International Programs to manage international projects.
RTI provided funding assistance to help found the
North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) is a two-year, public residential high school located in Durham, North Carolina, that focuses on the intensive study of science, mathematics and technology. It accepts rising juniors ...
in 1980. Two years later was part of a joint venture to create Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC), a non-profit whose computer network connected local K-12 schools.
Organization
RTI International is a not-for-profit research organization. RTI was initially established by three local universities but it is managed by a separate board and management team.
RTI's structure consists of members of the corporation, the board of governors and corporate officers. The members of the corporation elect governors, who in turn create the organization's policies.
RTI has primarily eight practice areas:
RTI also has a separate business called RTI Health Solutions, which supports biotech, diagnostic and medical device companies.
As of 2012, the organization's largest service areas were in social, statistical and environmental sciences. More than half of RTI's staff have advanced degrees in one of 120 fields and work on approximately 1,200 projects at a time.
RTI has twelve US offices and twelve international locations, supporting operations in 80 countries.
About 60 percent of RTI's staff are headquartered on a 180-acre campus inside the
Research Triangle Park.
Most of RTI International's funding comes from government research contracts.
In 2018 RTI staff authored 1,052 journal articles.
The Institute bids on $2 billion in research contracts a year and wins approximately 40 percent of the budget it bids on.
While RTI is technically a non-profit research institute, senior employees are rewarded salary bonuses (4% for senior staff, and 9-15% for managers) based on annual performance and corporate profit. However, employees have no current vested interest or role in corporate governance.
Projects
![RTI scientists](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/RTI_scientists.jpg)
RTI International's research has spanned areas like cancer, pollution, drug abuse and education.
RTI scientists
Monroe Wall
Monroe Eliot Wall (1916 – July 6, 2002) was an American chemist, who co-discovered, with Mansukh C. Wani, paclitaxel and camptothecin, two anti-cancer drugs considered standard in the treatment to fight ovarian, breast, lung and colon cance ...
and
Mansukh C. Wani synthesized anti-cancer treatments
camptothecin
Camptothecin (CPT) is a topoisomerase inhibitor. It was discovered in 1966 by M. E. Wall and M. C. Wani in systematic screening of natural products for anticancer drugs. It was isolated from the bark and stem of '' Camptotheca acuminata'' (Campt ...
in 1966, from the bark of the
Camptotheca tree, and
Taxol
Paclitaxel (PTX), sold under the brand name Taxol among others, is a chemotherapy medication used to treat a number of types of cancer. This includes ovarian cancer, esophageal cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma, cervical ca ...
in 1971, from a Pacific yew tree.
These two drugs account for $3 billion a year in sales by pharmaceutical companies.
In 1986, RTI was awarded a $4 million contract with the
National Cancer Institute
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) coordinates the United States National Cancer Program and is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is one of eleven agencies that are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ...
to conduct an eight-year clinical trial on the effects of an anti-smoking campaign. Two years later, RTI began a $4.4 million program to coordinate AIDS drug trials for the
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...
. This grew to $26 million by 1988.
RTI scientists helped identify toxic chemicals in the
Love Canal
Love Canal is a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, United States, infamous as the location of a landfill that became the site of an enormous environmental disaster in the 1970s. Decades of dumping toxic chemicals harmed the health of hund ...
in the 1970s.
In 1978, RTI researched the possibility of improving solar cells for the
US Department of Energy
The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United State ...
and
coal gasification for the
Environmental Protection Agency
A biophysical environment is a biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, and consequently includes the factors that have an influence in their survival, development, and evolution. A biophysical environment can vary in scale f ...
in 1979. RTI trained Chinese government employees on using computer models to forecast pollution patterns before the 2007 Olympics in Beijing.
An RTI survey in 1973, commissioned by the
Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs
The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) was a bureau within the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and a predecessor agency of the modern Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
History
It was created by § 3 of the Reorganizatio ...
, confirmed prior research that found no connection between drug use and violent crime, despite prior perceptions of heroin users as more prone to violence. A 1975 study RTI conducted for the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that 28 percent of 13,000 teenagers polled were "problem drinkers," despite their age. A 1996 study done by RTI and funded by
the Pentagon
The Pentagon is the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense. It was constructed on an accelerated schedule during World War II. As a symbol of the U.S. military, the phrase ''The Pentagon'' is often used as a metony ...
found that drug abuse in the military had been reduced by 90 percent since 1980.
RTI in 1975 recommended that the
Bureau of the Mint halt expensive production of pennies, and replace half-dollars with a new dollar coin. In 2001, RTI scientists created a new thinfilm superlattice material that uses the
thermoelectric effect
The thermoelectric effect is the direct conversion of temperature differences to electric voltage and vice versa via a thermocouple. A thermoelectric device creates a voltage when there is a different temperature on each side. Conversely, when ...
to cool microprocessors. A 2009 study by RTI and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency, under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgi ...
published in ''Health Affairs'' estimated that obesity in the US caused $147 billion in increased medical care costs annually. RTI also developed a reading skill measurement program, the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA), for the USAID and the World Bank. The EGRA has been used in 70 languages and 50 countries.
In the 1980s, RTI created and distributed the
Architecture Design and Assessment System
The Architecture Design and Assessment System (ADAS) was a set of software programs offered by the Research Triangle Institute from the mid-1980s until the early 1990s.G.A. Frank, D.L. Franke, and W.F. Ingogly, "An Architecture Design and Assessmen ...
, a set of software programs that helped model intricate systems. The ADAS programs were produced until the mid-1990s.
RTI began working for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) after the conflict between Iraq and the US began in 2003.
USAID work represented 35 percent of RTI's revenue by 2010.
Under Iraq’s previous, highly centralized regime, citizens had almost no experience with local governance or active participation in the governing process. To inform and train Iraqis in local governance systems, RTI ultimately set up offices in Iraq’s eighteen provinces. A staff of 200 people drawn from 33 countries, augmented by the hiring of 800 Iraqis, was deployed.
In 2004, Nextreme was spun off of RTI to develop a thermoelectric material for semiconductors commercially.
In October 2018, RTI published a study showing that
heroin
Heroin, also known as diacetylmorphine and diamorphine among other names, is a potent opioid mainly used as a recreational drug for its euphoric effects. Medical grade diamorphine is used as a pure hydrochloride salt. Various white and brow ...
addicts that used
fentanyl
Fentanyl, also spelled fentanil, is a very potent synthetic opioid used as a pain medication. Together with other drugs, fentanyl is used for anesthesia. It is also used illicitly as a recreational drug, sometimes mixed with heroin, cocaine ...
testing strips were more likely to adopt safer drug habits.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rti International
Multidisciplinary research institutes
Non-profit organizations based in North Carolina
Research institutes in North Carolina
Research Triangle
1958 establishments in North Carolina
Life sciences industry
Organizations established in 1958