One of the shortcoming that Greater Nashua faces when luring established tech businesses or starting new ones is our lack of a big research university, bristling with tenured professors and grad students handling weird, expensive science equipment to generate ideas and energy and help for companies.
The sort of place that, for example, would open an $80 million research and development facility for plastics engineering, nanotechnology, molecular biology and optics, built atop $700,000 worth of extra concrete to reduce minute vibrations that could affect scientific instruments, its walls filled with copper to turn rooms into Faraday cages that capture stray voltage that could affect other scientific instruments, containing what may be the largest Class 100 cleanroom north of Boston.
Rivier University, Daniel Webster College, Thomas More College and Nashua Community College aren’t that kind of school, while UNH and Dartmouth are too far away to benefit us enough.
Yet it’s easy to forget that we do have such a school close by, just a 20-minute non-rush hour drive south of The Telegraph’s Hudson office. Many of us overlook it because you have to (shudder) cross into Massachusetts.
I was reminded of UMass Lowell’s proximity when I was given a tour of the new Saab Emerging Technologies and Innovation Center, a gleaming research and development and teaching center that opened last fall, the latest expansion of the 14,000-student school along both sides of the Merrimack River.![]()
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