Old Dominion University has long been known for training some of the Navy’s top leaders, according to Marty Irvine, Jr. He was recently hired as the university’s first Associate Vice President for National Security Initiatives.
Irvine comes to ODU after 27 years in the Navy. He was recently the executive director at NAVSEA, which oversees research and development for the Navy. Before that, he ran Submarine Forces.
Naval officers have often earned graduate degrees at Old Dominion while they’re stationed in Hampton Roads. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle has a graduate degree from ODU, as does INDO-PAC Commander Adm. Sam Paparo. The university was an early leader in online education, making the process much easier for deploying officers, Irvine said.
“I was talking to a previous member of the Submarine Force, and he mentioned that ODU actually used to send them envelopes of CDs for their courses to take while they were underway,” Irvine said. “So, I think a lot of Navy people recognize ODU, but not necessarily as a top research university.”
Less than five years ago, Old Dominion was designated as a top research institution by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Irvine’s new job is to convince the Pentagon and top defense contractors that the university is ready to turn the corner.
“I think that Hampton Roads has been a very traditional, blue-collar space, right working the shipyards. The high-tech stuff hasn't traditionally been here, but I think that's been changing, and we're starting to see that grow,” he said.
He is based in Washington, D.C.,. to be close to the Pentagon, but he spent large portions of his Navy career around Norfolk.
“We want to leverage there's a lot of retired military in this space here who have great ideas and have a lot of experience. How do I turn them into kind of those additional tech startups, companies?” He said.
The Pentagon has new money for shipbuilding and to speed up the acquisition of drones and unmanned ships and submersible vehicles. The university believes it can strengthen its ties with the shipbuilding industry, like Huntington Ingalls Insdustries to find ways to speed up maintenance and help with new construction, using artificial intelligence tools.
“ODU has an outstanding engineering school here in the area. We want to graduate students here and keep them here to be part of the larger ecosystem,” he said.
The area is trying to push more heavily into the high-tech? sector at a time when the local defense industry is losing public-sector research jobs at NASA-Langley Research Center and Jefferson Labs as part of cuts under the Trump administration.
“There are going to be some cutbacks in that area. A lot of this is looking to have industry and other nontraditional partners kind of help in that space too. And I think that's where ODU can be a player in that space,” he said.
