Research

The College of Business and Technology (CBAT) has a number of labs, centers, and other resources to support research activities.

Engineering, Engineering Technology, Surveying, and Interior Architecture Labs

The Department of Engineering, Engineering Technology, Surveying, and Interior Architecture houses several labs including Construction Material Testing Lab, Mechanical Engineering lab, Robotics Lab, Manufacturing Lab, and Wood Lab. These labs can play a vital role for prototyping and testing digital and physical objects for various research activities.

The Construction Material Testing Lab has various pieces of equipment for conducting soil and concrete tests such as compression machines, concrete mixers, soil analysis equipment, ovens, fluid equipment, and beam deflectors. 

The Mechanical Engineering Lab has various pieces of equipment, such as, tensile tester, hardness testers, Stanford Research Dynamic Signal Analyzer, Fluke IR thermographic system, Fluke Power Analyzer, and Combustion Analyzer.

The Robotics Lab has various pieces of equipment including six-axis robotic arms, programmable logic controllers, 3D printing space that uses multiple Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), Stereolithography (SLA) resin printers, and Specific Laser Sintering (SLS). Further, the lab is also equipped with software for generating digital twins for manufacturing.

The Manufacturing Lab has various pieces of equipment that use CNC or manual fabrication technology. The pieces of equipment that uses CNC includes such as CNC router, CNC bed mills, and CNC laser cutters. The pieces of equipment that use manual fabrication technology include manual bed mills, manual lathes, and drill presses.

The Wood Lab has various pieces of equipment including a large planer, jointers, manual routers, drill presses, and wood lathe.

Other computer labs in the department are equipped with up-to-date engineering and statistical software tools such as Autodesk Revit, Microsoft Project, Autodesk AutoCAD, Primavera, ProEst, Matlab, Labview, and Multisim.

 

Digital Media Center

The Digital Media Center, located in a wing of The Millennium Center, is a modern building built in 2000. It houses four digital media labs along with nine offices. The Digital Media Center is located on the north side of State of Franklin Rd. from main campus and is reachable by a pedestrian bridge.

The center houses a high-capacity render farm that uses the combination of local machines and dedicated machines for Animation and Visual Effects. The render farm is designed to meet the needs of industry standard software and output formatting (rendering) required by digital media students. Two important design choices have been made to ensure environmental sustainability and cost-effective utilization of existing resources. First, any computers in student labs – that are not in use at any given time – automatically contributes to the computing resources for the render farm via Local Area Network (LAN). Second, older computers – that otherwise may be decommissioned – are added to the cluster of computers for the render farm to provide additional computing resources.

Lab #195 has a built-in green-screen area and a prop room. The green screen area is specifically wired to support a lighting grid. The center has an equipment room consisting of various production gears such as 40 DSLR cameras and lenses, tripods, light kits, wireless mic kits, boom mics, projectors, steady cam rigs, and more. The labs are also equipped with industry standard software tools for visual editing such as Adobe Premier, Adobe Illustrator, Autodesk Maya, Adobe Photoshop, and Trimble Sketchup.

 

Bloomberg Terminal

The department of Economics and Finance owns a Bloomberg Terminal that provides access to Bloomberg Professional Services for monitoring and analyzing real-time financial market data, getting up to date financial news, and getting professional insights on the market. The terminal is used for research and educational purposes at ETSU. Financing professionals use such terminal for placing trades in addition to monitoring the market.

 

Center for Banking

The ETSU Center for Banking was established in 1986 to provide quality education and to promote and support economic and technical development in the region. The center houses a large volume of information resources for students, bankers, and researchers. It sponsors and publishes research on regional banking and public policy issues and provides research assistantships to students. More information on the center can be found here: Center for Banking (etsu.edu).

 

Bureau of Business and Economic Research

The Bureau of Business and Economic Research was established to conduct research and data analysis to support economic and community development within the state of Tennessee and our region. More information about the bureau can be found here: Bureau of Business and Economic Research (etsu.edu).

 

Supply Chain Center

Dr. Matt Jenkins is establishing plans to do deep research in the Supply Chain/Logistics space in concert with the Department of Management & Marketing creating a Major in Supply Chain. External monies are being raised to fund access to various databases.  He has also involved external clients (e.g., BioPure) to support the center.

 

CRSP Database

The CBAT has subscription to Center for Research in Security Prices, LLC (CRSP) database that provides various market data such as pricing, return, dividends, volume, shares, etc. for every stock and ETF since 1926. Several faculty members of the college including Dr. Bill Trainor, Dr. Richard Gregory, and Dr. Gary Shelley have published more than a dozen papers by analyzing data from CRSP database.

Miscellaneous Resources

More important than any of the labs and centers, the CBAT has an excellent faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduate students who are all essential to advance any research agenda. The college has access to various research journals and conference proceedings related to business and technology to support researchers. The CBAT computer labs have access to various statistical software packages such STATA and R.