Photo By Frank Kaminski | Students from Washington State University Bremerton visited Naval Undersea Warfare...... read more read more
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Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division, Keyport is leveraging the Naval Engineering Education Consortium program to solve critical Navy challenges while cultivating the next generation of naval engineers.
The program, which operates across all Naval Sea Systems Command Warfare Centers, brings together students, professors, and Navy scientists and engineers to tackle specific Navy technology needs. Through grants to partnering colleges and universities, it allows students to gain practical experience with guidance from both their faculty and engineers at sponsoring Warfare Centers.
"The concept is, let's invest some money in colleges with projects that are Navy-focused, with the goal of trying to get Navy recruits out of it,” said Wayne Jordheim, Nontraditional Programs lead at NUWC Division, Keyport and a longtime NEEC mentor. “Getting people interested in coming to work for the Navy is priority one. Getting something usable out of the technology is priority two. It's really an employee development program just as much as engineering research.”
NUWC Division, Keyport is currently engaged with more than a dozen universities through NEEC, and these partnerships have resulted in the hiring of nearly 20 former students into the command’s civilian workforce over the course of its decade-long involvement with NEEC. Its engagements with Washington State University and the University of New Hampshire have yielded the highest number of new hires.
By attracting, developing and retaining a capable workforce, the command’s involvement in NEEC directly aligns to the fourth Naval Sea Systems Command Enterprise Strategy Line of Effort: "Strengthen the Navy Team."
Jordheim said many of WSU’s NEEC participants are non-traditional students who bring valuable real-world experience from previous careers—including military service—to their work at NUWC Division, Keyport.
Students from WSU’s Bremerton campus were involved in a project last spring at NUWC Division, Keyport’s Transducer Automated Test Facility. Working alongside NEEC mentors and personnel from the command's Test and Evaluation Department, the students did prototype testing for a magnetic induction communication system. The project marked the first time this prototype had been tested in a large-scale, controlled underwater environment.
According to Nick Samos, a systems engineer at NUWC Division, Keyport and a technical point of contact for the NEEC grant, the project addressed a key naval challenge: overcoming problems with interference and signal disruption associated with conventional underwater communication methods.
The magnetic induction project is a prime example of NEEC’s success as a workforce development tool. Six of the students involved have since been hired permanently at NUWC Division, Keyport, in addition to gaining valuable real-world engineering experience.
One of these hires, Mark Ansell, is now a test engineer at the Environmental Test Lab.
“It's in some ways like a year-long interview process with a whole bunch of practical aspects to that interview,” said Ansell. “And that really set us up for success in getting jobs here, because we did good work for the NEEC program. They recognized that and recognized the set of skills that we had as skills that they wanted at Keyport.”
Army veteran Randy Baker, now an environmental test engineer at NUWC Division, Keyport, said the project taught him how to approach problems with an engineering mindset.
“Because we were exposed to something that was so new and had never been touched before, it truly helped us learn indirectly how to be engineers,” said Baker. “We were told that to be an engineer you're going to find yourself in situations where you don't have the answer, but your job as the engineer is to find that answer.”
Electrical engineer Brent Otto, another hire from the WSU project, has since had the opportunity to mentor the next group of students working on the same project.
“I got to kind of do it from the other side, where I helped coordinate the test event and help the students go through a test readiness review,” said Otto. “It was in my first years, so I hadn't had a lot of experience with organizing a task and coordinating with the labs. It was a lot of fun.”
Beyond recruitment, the NEEC program has raised NUWC Division, Keyport's profile within the Navy's science and technology community.
"It's reflective of the slight evolution at Keyport from being a very good engineering center to being an engineering center that is also starting to engage in that earlier part of the acquisition process, where research and applied research is actually happening," said Martin Renken, one of the command’s original NEEC coordinators.
Renken added that NUWC Division, Keyport plans to expand its NEEC involvement to other regional institutions and into new disciplines like computer science and cyber engineering.
NUWC Division, Keyport NEEC Director Sam De Lano said the command's current NEEC portfolio is one of the largest among the Warfare Centers.
"We definitely plan on continuing, participating and taking advantage of the program," he said.
-KPT- Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division, Keyport is headquartered in the state of Washington on the Puget Sound, about 10 miles west of Seattle. To provide ready support to Fleet operational forces at all major Navy homeports in the Pacific, NUWC Division, Keyport maintains detachments in San Diego, California and Honolulu, Hawaii, and remote operating sites in Guam; Japan; Hawthorne, Nevada; and Portsmouth, Virginia. At NUWC Division, Keyport, our diverse and highly skilled team of engineers, scientists, technicians, administrative professionals and industrial craftsmen work tirelessly to develop, maintain and sustain undersea warfare superiority for the United States.
| Date Taken: | 01.26.2026 |
| Date Posted: | 01.26.2026 14:16 |
| Story ID: | 556798 |
| Location: | KEYPORT, WASHINGTON, US |
| Web Views: | 19 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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