UNC System President Erskine Bowles, who was present at the announcement by Chancellor Stanley F. Battle, said the achievement reflects well on the university.

"The fabulous thing to me is there were only five of these awarded in the country and two of them are in North Carolina -- the one here at A&T and another one at N.C. State, which is a real reflection on the quality of engineering research that we're doing at our universities," Bowles said.

N.C. A&T is the first Historical Black College and University to be selected to create an Engineering Research Center.

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The $18.5 million grant will help engineers and doctors at the three schools to develop naturally dissolving medical devices like stents and screws instead of the traditional metal ones.

"So we started asking questions like what would happen if we put in a metal that was supposed to corrode and that might allow us to do regenerative approaches where the tissue heals around the metal but then the metal goes away," William Wagner, with the University of Pittsburgh, said. "It's particularly important in children where a child is growing and that metal would be gone and allow the child's tissue to grow unconstrained by that metal."

Bowles says the ERC at A&T will benefit the entire state.

"It is the single most exciting thing that I've had a chance to be involved with because it will create jobs -- good jobs, high wage jobs," Bowles said. "So it is a big deal for North Carolina."