Date

April 14, 2014

Attendance

Callie Babbitt, Vicki Hanson, Hector Flores, Ryne Raffaelle, Harvey Palmer, Hector Flores, Andrew Herbert, Lawrence, Manuela Campanelli, Andrew Sears, Andre Hudson, Meredith Smith, Bruce Austin, Pengcheng Shi, Eric Hittinger, Jennifer Santoru, Jennifer Schneider, Laurence Sugarman, Purushotham, Joel Kastner

 

Presentation from Ryne Raffaelle

(Presented PPT file is included in list of attachments on main page)

Note that over recent years, the federal budget for research funding has been on a downward trend.   However, relative to some of our competitors we have been doing a good job of remaining competitive, particularly among universities that do not have medical schools.

 

RIT is 60th in non-medical research funding; 44th in non-medical corporate funding.

 

Where is discretionary funding?   Defense spending is coming down; applied research budget is going up. 

 

The number and percentage of RIT faculty submitted proposals is increasing.  And the monetary value of these proposals continues to increase.  $40 million funding this year.

 

RIT researchers have been winning NSF awards:  3 CAREER awards; Research Infrastructure award; $1M STEP awards; ADVANCE award; Innovation Site Award.  In sum, NSF is really starting to take notice of RIT.

 

Image Permanence Institute awards: 7 NEH awards last year.

 

NIH Funding can be huge because it is typically in medical / health areas.   RIT is getting some traction now. 

 

The research department staff have decreased, despite the increase in the number of submissions.   Thus, there can’t be a lot of value add from Research office.   Comparably-sized research offices may have double the staff.

 

The level of support for research at RIT is very low.   This is an impediment for going further.   Leadership says half of the overhead is being re-invested in university research (university keeps a chunk, but say more is spent than is brought in).   This is a tiny amount of research investment.

  • Not all grants generate overhead
  • Some university invest huge amounts of money in research, often through large start-up funds

 

Questions for Ryne:

  • Where does RIT have a competitive advantage?   With industry.    In comparison to our peers, we do much better in industry funding.
  • If you wanted to double our research funding, where would you go?  Federal government still has the lion’s share of the funds; need federal grants.
  • There are more proposals, probably related to asking all faculty to do research, but what is the hit rate given this increased number?   We have a great hit rate, about 55%.   This high rate is due to still having established researchers applying.   However, for those not traditionally researchers, their chances of a successful proposal are slim and hurting our overall numbers.   Bad proposals hurt our reputation with agencies.
    • Vast majority of our researchers submit one proposal per year.  Ryne has been suggesting that researchers need to submit 3 per year.
    • Remember that revise and resubmit works.
    • So this steady increase in new proposals is due to new faculty who are more inclined to submit?   Also, a lot of our growth has been in 6 centers of excellence.  This growth due to heavy-hitter model – people who are able to get some collaborators around them.
    • Does it make sense to ask everyone to do research?  Wouldn’t it be better to reward those who are teachers for what they are good at doing?  As an Institute, we are still pushing everyone to submit and this may not make sense.
    • If you could do something different and transformational for research at RIT, what would you do?   Invest strategically.   Get university to commit a percentage of operating budget to research.  What do we need?  1%, 2%?   Use it to seed some institute-wide interdisciplinary initiatives. 
      • Cluster hires, common expertise
      • Infrastructure for what they need
      • Seed funding for students to do what they need
        • Need a real commitment to funding some area
        • Could we say that if we get $50M for 5 years, we will commit to a certain amount of research funding in some cluster areas?   This is an Internal R&D argument.   But a 1:1 ROI won’t be sufficient as an argument.   [Maximum reasonable for us is $100M/year].  

 

Comment:  There will be a Research Space task force as space is currently at a premium, and this will become more imperative if research grows.

 

Summary from Ryne:  Need investment or we have plateaued.  Suggests cluster hires.

 

Going forward:  How to proceed towards the final goals

We’ll divide into three key goals / themes.

  1. Strategic areas.  What are the areas?  What are the processes? Consider our strengths, government trends (what will they fund in the future?), and what will have the biggest impact.   And we need a process in place for reconsidering these areas, changes as necessary.
  2. Investment / structure for interdisciplinary research.   What funding is required?   space / culture / equipment / faculty.
  3. Research culture.   How do we develop a research culture?   How do we serve graduate students who are not researchers?

 

How do we incorporate the fact that funding is federal?   Need to incorporate organizational agility.

 

Comments:  

 

Won’t there need to be very bold change suggested?  That’s fine.

 

Isn’t this déjà vu?  We did this about 5 years as an exercise for supporting research.

 

Suggestion for BioFuel as a strategic area.   Have related companies in the area, but no competing universities locally.   Takes advantage of our geographic space.

 

An issue is that faculty would like a more grassroots approach to defining strategic areas.  The suggestion is that a process be recommended such that in future times of defining strategy a process involving staff in the future.

 

A 10-year plan:  needs local, regional, and globally-relevant research.

 

Administrators need to ask university contributors for funding for a research building.

For next week

People should organize around the three areas.  Some groups were formed at this meeting.   For those not present when groups were formed, there is still time to join!  The wiki will have a page for each of the groups.

 

Feel free to contribute ideas to more than one group.