The overarching goal of the C3N Program is to build collaboration between University Park-based research centers and Commonwealth Campus faculty nodes. All University Park centers participating in this program have tremendous experience in securing and managing external research funding from a variety of agencies, industry, and other organizations.
Since 2019, C3N has established ten nodes.
Further, these centers are hubs for conducting cutting-edge research in a given technical area, resulting in high-impact journal publications and multi-million-dollar external funding. Thus, these centers provide great opportunities for networking, building research partnerships, and creating large team efforts that span across the campuses. Some faculty members based at the campuses are already part of University Park research centers.