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The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has awarded Virginia Tech and Howard University $2.5M for the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (ICCAE) to help meet the intelligence community’s critical need for diverse personnel who possess the technological, analytic and critical language capabilities needed for the 21st Century world. Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, framed the need, “We need employees with a wide background with national ethnic origin in order to be effective with different foreign language capabilities, different heritages, different ethnicities, different orientations, different perspectives, different ideas for us to do our job. And we’re a better force for it.” Virginia Tech and Howard University will help develop the pipeline of qualified candidates through a targeted development of pre-collegiate outreach, National Security symposium, basic research in IC relevant topics, curriculum development, funding students to study abroad, and facilitating internships and co-ops with IC agencies, national labs, and related industries.