Institutional Priorities

Each year, NPS outlines its institutional priorities. These priorities reveal where we concentrate our support to the school for the coming year. While priorities change from year-to-year, the mission of the school and the effects of our support do not: Together, we are enhancing national security, strengthening our military capability, and funding essential programs to hasten innovation in our Department of Defense.

Enhance NPS Mission Effectiveness.

Strengthen the NPS community through events, activities, and services that enhance NPS student, staff, faculty and family experience.

Support modern learning areas within NPS facilities.

Extend the Reach and Increase the Focus of NPS Education.

Promote cooperative efforts between NPS and other organizations within the Naval University System.

Increase the Impact of Research that is Fully Informed and Contributes to Warfighting.

Foster dialogue and strategic partnerships between NPS students and faculty with industry to solve challenges and increase capability.

Expand applied research functions, incubate a culture of experimentation, and accelerate solution transition.

Advance STEM education and career pathways through advocacy, outreach and engagement

Lead Naval Innovation Through a Collaborative Ecosystem

Establish the Naval Innovation Center at the NPS.

Nurture an innovation and collaboration ecosystem.

Expand capability and capacity to support ideation, creation, and experimentation of innovative solutions.

Support existing and emerging innovation programs and activities.

Support Naval Warfare Studies Institute activities.

Support research groups aligned to operational headquarters, staffs and units.

Expand the Gaming, Exercising, Modeling, and Simulation capability and capacity directly aligned to naval priorities.

Enable the NPS Mission Through Advancing the Institution

Strengthen NPS Alumni Outreach & Pride

Support NPS Strategic Communications

Support student and faculty achievements and applied research that solves relevant operational problems, leverages emerging technologies, and leads to improvements in naval warfighting and national security.

Community Outreach

The Foundation sponsors events such as Discovery Day at NPS, which brings over 2,000 students and teachers from the surrounding community to enable STEM interaction and encourage the pursuit of STEM disciplines. This open-campus event features STEM demonstrations and activities, research lab tours, keynote lectures with inspiring guests (such as alumni astronauts), and innovation design challenges. Discovery Day provides attendees with the opportunity to see firsthand how NPS accomplishes its unique mission of defense-focused graduate education through STEM curricula. Each year, the NPS Foundation sponsors the event to help bring a diverse group of students onto campus and encourage them to pursue STEM disciplines.

The NPS Foundation is also a sponsor of the Rapid Innovation Design Challenge, which debuted during Discovery Day in May 2022. Developed in coordination with NPS faculty, the NPS Foundation supports the design challenges with funding, corporate partnership, and educator outreach. With the goal of expanding STEM opportunities across the Central California Coast region, the Rapid Innovation Design Challenge enables NPS student mentors and faculty to work with high school student teams from the local community to create meaningful solutions with global impact.
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In the 2023 fiscal year, the NPS Foundation invested over $108,000 in community outreach activities.

Facilities

Tomorrow’s conflicts will be more integrated, autonomous, and agile than any in our history. Your donation funds all-domain research and classroom facilities that enable NPS to forge a future where NPS’ students, faculty and accomplishments are central to the success of the Naval and Joint Forces. The NPS Foundation funds new facilities and upgrades existing spaces on campus.

Naval innovation center

In order to best educate and prepare NPS students for 21st century warfare, a modern, state-of-the-art, educational venue is required on the NPS campus. The Naval Innovation Center at the Naval Postgraduate School will enable interdisciplinary, project-based learning that creates warfighting solutions at the speed of relevance. Deliberately designed to prioritize collaboration, hands-on experimentation, advanced analytics, autonomous technologies, increasingly classified work and immersive demonstrations, this facility will be optimized to create solutions with direct relevance to the Fleet, while also sustaining long-term thinking for the future of the Navy and broader DOD. Learn More.

The NPS Beach Lab

The Sea Land Air Military Research Lab (SLAMR) initiative began with a $10,000 Seed grant from the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation in 2016. Additional seedling grants of more than $450,000 from the NPS Foundation were used to refurbish a former county wastewater treatment plant into what is now the NPS Beach Lab, a multi-domain research facility for private industry, academia and government experimentation and research projects focusing on national defense applications in robotics, autonomous systems, cybersecurity and maritime related 5G telecommunications.

Athena

The national security challenges we face require close collaboration across domains, disciplines and services to spur innovation across the Joint Force. To enable innovators across the national security ecosystem and address the challenge of disconnectedness across the Department of Defense and academia, the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation is developing a collaborative research tool in partnership with Microsoft and the Naval Postgraduate School.

Athena, which began as a student project and early prototype, is an application built on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Teams to assure security and enhance scalability. Athena empowers researchers, sponsors and leaders across the Naval Education Enterprise and the DOD to access and query information currently stored in numerous separate databases by use of keywords, topics of interest, service priorities and other filters.

Athena for Partners enables the integration of industry partners into the problem-solving network for the Naval Postgraduate School. It allows industry partners to discover the priority problems facing the DOD, identify projects to work on, and volunteer their services and resources to support NPS students and collaborative agreements with NPS.

Athena allows academia, industry and the DOD to work together as a team to solve the hardest and highest priority challenges facing our nation.
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During the 2022 fiscal year, the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation invested over $550,000 and thousands of volunteer hours on the design, development and hosting of Athena. In June 2022, Athena was gifted to and accepted by the Naval Postgraduate School. As NPS works to roll out the use of Athena internally, the NPS Foundation’s Athena Development Team is using NPS community input to improve the product, add new features and introduce other organizations.
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Discover Athena:

Athena at a glance

Visit the Athena for Partners Website

Athena from the NPS student perspective (video)

Athena from the leadership perspective (video)

NPS Foundation Delivers Athena to NPS

NPS, Microsoft accelerate R&D capabilities