Leon Osborne: Spinning research into enterprise

Since Leon Osborne first arrived on campus more than two decades ago, the work of the affable meteorologist has been cited as a classic example of how research can be “spun off” to the private sector, thereby benefiting the investigator, the University, and the state.

His company, Meridian Environmental Technology, Inc., has operated since 1996, commercializing the results of the weather-related research work done in his UND lab. Specializing in a wide variety of weather-related products and managed by his wife Kathy, the business is about to move from UND’s technology incubator to a nearby site.

Meridian’s staff totals about 40, including three UND professors on a part-time basis. Its client list includes major companies, state transportation departments, and other entities in 20 states.

Osborne remains a professor, however, in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and director of the UND Regional Weather Information Center. There he has been successful in obtaining grants (worth $28 million at last count) supporting the kind of basic scientific research from which flow the practical applications that can be developed and marketed by companies such as Meridian.

He also does missionary work among his colleagues, pointing out that new technology can be created in fields such as music and business as well as the sciences. He chairs the search committee that will soon hire UND’s first full-time technology transfer officer.

Despite the fact that his department is located in the John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences, Osborne has become a national authority on surface transportation. For one thing, he says, the field is ripe with research possibilities. The Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorology recently published a list of 126 weather-related topics. It estimated that adequate research was being done in about 10 of them.

Most of these 10 topics are being investigated in Grand Forks, Osborne said.

Wearing his faculty hat, Osborne is currently leading an effort to secure matching funds from public and private partners (including his own company) to land an $836,000 federal grant that would create an institute to explore the interface between weather and the decisions highway officials must make regarding road maintenance.

Meridian already sells a product in this area by providing detailed site-specific weather forecasts. This enables transportation maintenance crew chiefs to decide how best to deploy their snow plows.

Looking out his window toward the nearby UND research park, site of a National Weather Service office, Osborne asserts that Grand Forks is already on the national radar screen with respect to transportation weather research.

But, he adds, it could be even better.