Washington, D.C. – (March, 2014) Dennis McGrann, Executive Director of N.O.I.S.E. – the National Organization to Ensure a Sound-controlled Environment – a 40 year affiliate of the National League of Cities (NLC), recently chaired the 22nd biannual and final meeting of the United States Department of Transportation/Federal Aviation Administration’s Center of Excellence – PARTNER (Partnership for Air Transportation Noise and Emissions Reduction) in Washington, DC. McGrann has chaired the Center's Advisory Board over its entire 10 year life and has overseen $130M federal investments in energy and environmental research impacting the aviation industry. The PARTNER-COE is a joint research effort of the FAA, NASA, Department of Defense, EPA, and Transport Canada and is led by a team of scientists and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with support from 12 universities in the United States and Canada, including Harvard, Stanford, Purdue and Georgia Institute of Technology. The Center was charted by an Act of Congress to carryout advanced research in the aviation field and has led to breakthrough technological, operational, policy, and workforce advances for national security and the environment. The Center’s research is part of and supports the FAA’s multi-million dollar remake of the United States airspace and aviation system called NextGen – The “Next Generation Air Transportation System”. The organization’s operational headquarters is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment in Boston, Massachusetts.