A new collaboration between the U.S. Navy and the University of Michigan aims to cultivate more engineering talent equipped with the skills to create the future technologies for the military.

U-M today officially launched the Naval Engineering Education Center after receiving a $3.2 million federal contract to direct the center, which boasts a coalition of 15 universities and colleges. The agreement could be worth up to $49.9 million based on optional extensions built into the contract.

The Navy hopes the new initiative sparks more interest among talented engineering students in marine technology, including energy problems, ship design and maintenance issues. The military often bemoans the loss of top-notch scientific minds to the private sector.

“Solving the engineering problems our Navy faces is going to take the best minds,” U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, said this morning in Ann Arbor. “The Navy’s ships are among the most complex machines on the planet.”

Levin, also chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, said the Navy needs to produce more affordable ships that require less manpower and consume less energy.

“That is quite a menu of challenges,” he said. “The students who take on the NEEC challenges and projects will be dealing with some of the toughest engineering problems and challenges imaginable.”

The coalition backing the NEEC includes 15 other educational institutions, the American Society of Naval Engineers and the Society of Naval Architects. The institutions want to entice students, including high schoolers like those who engineered vessels to compete in today's SeaPerch competition at U-M, to study engineering.

U-M Vice President for Research Stephen Forrest said the NEEC would offer students the chance to work on projects to solve real-life problems.

“We believe that our other university partners in this endeavor are also very focused on this type of education, which we believe will benefit the Navy and its desire to have a more adept and professional group of students who can really help the Navy solve its problems today and tomorrow,” Forrest said.

The trend of giving students opportunities to work with industrial partners - which is commonplace particularly in the College of Engineering - is a defined strategy for the university.

“When you give a student or group of students a project-based education, they never forget and they learn much more than they do by simply opening the textbooks and reading the materials,” Forrest said.

Contact AnnArbor.com's Nathan Bomey at (734) 623-2587 or nathanbomey@annarbor.com. You can also follow him on Twitter or subscribe to AnnArbor.com's newsletters.