These efforts at the Department of Energy build on President Obama’s commitment to work with Congress to help keep college education affordable for America’s students by keeping interest rates low on student loans.

“We must invest in the next generation of American scientists and engineers in order to fulfill our commitment to restarting America’s nuclear industry and making sure that America stays competitive in the 21st century,” said Secretary Chu. “The awards announced today – from scholarships and fellowships to university-led nuclear research projects – are part of the Obama Administration’s efforts to keep college affordable for students nationwide. These investments in Illinois will help train and educate our future energy leaders, while developing the innovations we need to create new jobs and export opportunities for American-made nuclear technologies.”

Awards under the Nuclear Energy University Program are divided into multiple categories, including undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships, university-led research and development projects, and upgrades at university research reactors.

Read more at wifr.com, the CBS affiliate for the Rockford, Ill. area.

Pilla belongs to an emerging generation of students who have caught the entrepreneurship bug, inspired by startup wunderkinds such as Facebook‘s Mark Zuckerberg and enabled by the proliferation of accessible technology that allows them to build Web applications at low cost. In response, local universities are seeking to provide these students with resources not only to pursue their startup ambitions during school, but to plug into the state’s blossoming entrepreneurial community when they enter the workforce.

For Chicago-area startups, the promise of a stronger pipeline of homegrown talent helps reverse a long-standing gripe that Illinois loses too many engineering and computer science graduates to Silicon Valley…”The idea that we have (more than 1,000) great engineers sitting a couple hours’ drive away who are not thinking first and foremost that they should be coming to Chicago is a problem, but it’s something a bunch of people are working on,” said Troy Henikoff, co-founder and chief executive of Chicago-based startup accelerator Excelerate Labs.

“There so many dots — if you connect all of them, you just have a black piece of paper,” said Lawrence Schook, vice president of research at U. of I., who serves on Gov. Pat Quinn’s Illinois Innovation Council. “But there’s a sense of … alignment. There has to be alignment between the role of government, business and universities. We can hand off all the pieces of a company, but we need an ecosystem.”

Read more at the Chicago Tribune.

The Bioeconomy Blueprint will guide Federal agencies—in coordination with one another and in partnership with private-sector entities—to enhance economic growth and job creation, improve the health of all Americans, and move toward a clean-energy future through scientific discovery and technological innovation.

The biological sciences have demonstrated enormous advances in recent years. As a result, economic activity fueled by research and innovation in those fields—the “bioeconomy”—is also growing rapidly, providing an expanding array of job opportunities in both rural and urban environments. In addition to the societal benefits these advances are bringing in health, medicine, and agriculture, and through the development of clean energy sources, researchers are generating a growing spectrum of bio-based products for use in industrial and chemical processes, helping to reduce reliance on petroleum-based products.

The Bioeconomy Blueprint highlights life-sciences advances the Obama Administration is fostering and provides a roadmap for taking even greater advantage of trends and emerging capacities in this fast-moving field. The Blueprint identifies five strategic objectives to enable a vibrant U.S. bioeconomy in the years and decades ahead, with potential to deliver major economic and social benefits:

• Support R&D investments that will provide the foundation for the future U.S. bioeconomy
• Facilitate the transition of bioinventions from research lab to market, including an increased focus on translational and regulatory sciences
• Develop and reform regulations to reduce barriers, increase the speed and predictability of regulatory processes, and reduce costs while protecting human and environmental health
• Update training programs and align academic institution incentives with student training for national workforce needs
• Identify and support opportunities for the development of public-private partnerships and precompetitive collaborations — where competitors pool resources, knowledge, and expertise to learn from successes and failures.

To read the full press release, click here.

To read the National Bioeconomy Blueprint, click here.