Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division hosted the 2022 Naval Innovative Science and Engineering Technical Exchange Meeting September 21-22 in China Lake, California.

Called the NISE TEM for short, the event brings together scientists and engineers from the Navy’s warfare centers and laboratories for two days of collaboration focused around NISE-funded projects.

“The NISE program was created about a decade ago to really promote basic and applied research, the development and transition of technologies, workforce development, and laboratory revitalization,” said Andy Corzine, NAWCWD’s chief technology officer.

This year’s technical exchange meeting drew more than 400 participants from across the country.

“The thought process behind the TEM is that we bring those scientists and engineers together to share the work that they’re doing, some of their technical innovations, and the solutions to the problems that we’re working on across the Navy,” said the event’s sponsor, Dr. Brett Seidle, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, Test, and Engineering. “It’s a great way to foster connective tissue between our warfare centers and laboratories in ways that we don’t always naturally do.”

In addition to panel discussions and breakout sessions focused on topics such as technology forecasting, hypersonics, and artificial intelligence, participants had the opportunity to share their ongoing work in a series of poster sessions. Each project submitted a summary poster and stood by to discuss their process, results, and next steps with peers from other Navy laboratories and warfare centers.

“Events like these, and the NISE TEM specifically, really give our principle investigators and employees an unbelievable opportunity to see and learn about a lot of the similar work going on,” Corzine explained. “We’ve got more than 100 posters that allow people to really put some context into the work they’re doing and provide insight into what others are doing.”

Navy Warfare Centers and laboratories submitted a wide variety of topics for discussion during poster sessions. Projects highlighted included technology challenges, demonstration exercises, highlights from 5G testing, UAVs, machine learning, and more.

One thread running throughout all the projects: developing warfighting capabilities. Although the research and development enterprise is largely civilian, the ultimate focus is “fleet-first.” According to Dan Carreño, NAWCWD executive director, that focus is one that runs through all the warfare centers and labs, but is especially important to the NAWCWD workforce.

“The military-civilian partnership is crucial to the successfully executing our R&D mission,” he said, noting that although the Warfare Center is a mostly civilian enterprise, military members are embedded throughout the teams to give early feedback and help guide developments. “Early in my career I learned that I might have great ideas, only to find out that these ideas were not actually usable by the operators. We’re here to support the warfighter, and if our technologies, investments, and innovative ideas don’t have an end state of being usable by the fleet, then we don’t want to pursue them.”