A research center is a facility or building dedicated to research, commonly with the focus on a specific area. There are over 14,000 research centers in the United States. Centers apply varied disciplines including basic research and applied research in addition to non traditional techniques.
A research institute is an establishment endowed for doing research. Research institutes may specialize in basic research or may be oriented to applied research. Although the term often implies natural science research, there are also many research institutes in the social sciences as well, especially for sociological and historical research purposes.
In the early medieval period, several astronomical observatories were built in the Islamic world. The first of these was the 9th-century Baghdad observatory built during the time of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun, though the most famous were the 13th-century Maragheh observatory, 15th-century Ulugh Beg Observatory.
The earliest research institute in Europe was Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg complex on the island of Hven, a 16th-century astronomical laboratory set up to make highly accurate measurements of the stars. In the United States there are numerous notable research institutes including Bell Labs, The Scripps Research Institute,Beckman Institute, and SRI International. Hughes Aircraft used a research institute structure for its organizational model.
The National Wind Institute (NWI) at Texas Tech University (TTU) was established in December 2012, and is intended to serve as Texas Tech University’s intellectual hub for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, commercialization and education related to wind science, wind energy, wind engineering and wind hazard mitigation and serves faculty affiliates, students, and external partners.
In 2003, with support from the National Science Foundation, the first interdisciplinary Ph.D. program dedicated to wind science and engineering was developed. Later, the Texas Wind Energy Institute (TWEI) was established, and is a partnership between TTU and Texas State Technical College designed to develop education and career pathways to meet workforce and educational needs of the expanding wind energy industry. Partly funded by the Texas Workforce Commission. In an effort to streamline and to promote synergy, both WiSE and TWEI have now integrated to form the National Wind Institute.