RTI International - History

History

In 1954, Romeo Guest, a building contractor, met with the North Carolina state treasurer, Brandon Hodges, and President of Wachovia, Robert Hanes, to discuss building a research park in North Carolina to attract new industries to the region. They obtained support for the concept of Research Triangle Park from state governor Luther Hodges and the three universities that form the research triangle: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University and North Carolina State University. The Research Triangle Institute (now RTI International) was formed as the research park's first tenant in 1958 by the park's founders. In January the following year, it was announced that $1.425 million was raised by the Research Triangle Foundation to fund the park and $500,000 of it was set aside for RTI.

RTI started with three divisions: Isotope Development, Operational Sciences and Statistics Research. Its first contract was a $4,500 statistical study of morbidity data from Tennessee. In RTI's first year of operation, it had 25 staff and $240,000 in research contracts. Its early work was focused on statistics, but within a few years RTI expanded into radioisotopes, organic chemistry and polymers. In 1960 the Institute took on its first international research contract for agricultural census in Nigeria. RTI won contracts with the Department of Education, Defense Department, NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission, growing to $3.4 million in contracts in 1964 and $85 million in 1988.

In 1971, RTI's staff of 430 was reorganized into four research groups: social and economic systems, statistical sciences, environmental sciences and engineering, and chemistry and life sciences. It also created a division for education called the Center for Education Research and Evaluation. Four years later, RTI created the Office for International Programs to manage international projects. RTI provided financial assistance to help start the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, which was founded in 1980, and two years later RTI was part of a joint venture to create MCNC, a non-profit that created an IT network connecting local K-12 schools. A Health Solutions division was formed, in 2000, to serve the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries.

RTI started working with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) after the conflict between Iraq and the US began in 2003. USAID would become responsible for 35 percent of RTI's revenue by 2010. RTI worked with the US Agency for International Development in Iraq during which time the contractor, Unity Resources Group, hired to protect RTI staff shot and killed two Iraqi women on October 9, 2007. In 2004, Nextreme was spun-off of RTI to develop a thermoelectric material for semiconductors commercially. RTI acquired a healthcare marketing firm called MasiMax in March 2009. It also created another semiconductor startup that year called SiXis. In 2011 RTI created the Center for Agricultural and Environmental Biotechnology and in 2012 it acquired a California-based education research firm, MPR Associates.