Underwriters Laboratories Joins UIDP To Strengthen Collaborative Research Network

Underwriters Laboratories has expanded its potential research network by joining the UIDP, a nonprofit association that helps forge and strengthen university-industry partnerships for the public good.

The global safety science leader became a formal member of UIDP in late January 2022. Formed in 2006, UIDP provides a unique forum for representatives of innovative companies and well-regarded academic institutions interested in working together. Underwriters Laboratories joins the ranks of UIDP members such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Intel Corp., Stanford University, and BASF.

“We are dramatically increasing the scale and scope of our basic research to address today’s increasingly complex safety risks,” said Dr. Chris Cramer, Underwriters Laboratories’ chief research officer. “UIDP membership paves the way for additional relationships with other research organizations that will amplify the impact of our safety science work and enable us to obtain results unlikely to be achieved by any single organization on its own.”

Impact amplification was a crucial consideration in a partnership between Underwriters Laboratories and Northwestern University that resulted in the recent establishment of the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence, which created a wide-ranging research network focused on better incorporating safety and equity into artificial intelligence. Cramer believes the Underwriters Laboratories-Northwestern University partnership may serve as a collaborative research model, and will discuss the collaboration as a panelist at the UIDP spring 2022 conference in Atlanta.

Underwriters Laboratories has long emphasized collaborative research. While the organization has research institutes focused on chemical safety, digital safety, electrochemical safety, and fire safety, it is expanding its research scope to include emerging safety risks like those presented by environmental toxicology, renewable energy systems, and wildfires.

Read a Q&A with Cramer on the UIDP website.