New at RCSA
Jack Pladziewicz Recently Retired as Vice President of Research Corporation for Science Advancement
Jack Pladziewicz recently retired as Vice President of Research Corporation for Science 
Advancement. He came to RCSA as a program officer in April, 2003, from the chemistry department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he is Professor Emeritus, was on the faculty from 1973-2002 and served as department chair from 1999-2002. He received a BS degree in chemistry from Wisconsin-Eau Claire, a Ph.D. with specialization in inorganic chemistry working with James Espenson from Iowa State University, and did postdoctoral research with Henry Taube and Eugene van Tamelen at Stanford University.
Dr. Pladziewicz has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney and Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; Visiting Professor at the Chemical Center, Lund University, Lund, Sweden; Department of Biochemistry, University of Notre Dame; Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Minnesota-Minneapolis; and Visiting Scientist, Stanford Research Institute.
He has served on the RCSA Grants Advisory Committee, the Petroleum Research Fund Advisory Board, Committee of Visitors Triennial Oversight Review of NSF Chemistry Division, and as a consultant to industry and academia. His research interests include coordination chemistry, electron transfer reactions, and bioinorganic chemistry, with particular interest in radical cation-neutral reactions and metalloprotein electron transfer.
Dr. Pladziewicz will continue to consult with RCSA, but we thought it would be instructive to conduct a brief exit interview about his time at the Foundation as he makes this change in a long and distinguished career.
Q. What have you learned during your seven years at Research Corporation for Science Advancement?
Pladziewicz: As a result of working here, I have a much better understanding of the differences among various colleges and universities, and how important relatively small things are in terms of promoting scholarship and the engagement of students. Leadership is crucial.
There’s a vast difference in understanding at PUIs -- both among some of the faculty, and certainly at the administrative level -- as to what true scholarship is. During my academic career there has been a big shift in thinking toward the idea that research is a valuable experience for undergraduates; today there is a widespread and growing understanding that research complements rather than competes with formal coursework.
Unfortunately, academic leadership in some institutions still sees undergraduate research only as a competitive attractant. If you’re a private school and you’re competing with College X which has a very good undergraduate research program, then you must have one or you don’t compete for the top students. Although there’s been a general increase in the sense that undergraduate research is a good thing, there’s still a wide variation among many administrators in even understanding what it is. Places where faculty have been engaged in research as part of the curriculum and working with undergraduates for a long period of time realize that the final measure for true scholarship is its ability to impact a particular field and to be disseminated to that field in some way, and so they understand why publication is important.
Q. So there are still high-end schools today that view undergraduate research solely as a selling point?
Pladziewicz: Yes, as a selling point, but also as no more than a new curricular activity. A lot of institutions have improved the quality of instruction for their students by instituting a research-like experience – a good thing. They say “research experience” for their students, but really they mean “research-like,” because they see no connection between that and having students engaged in things that are going to be published. So they don’t see the importance of faculty competing for external grants. They don’t see the importance of publishing original work in top-tier journals, well-read journals. Students have a different view of the work they’re doing, of the data they’re collecting, when they understand that it’s important to the science community more broadly, that it could lead to a publication that will receive the scrutiny of the chemistry, physics, biology, or biochemistry community and that it could potentially change the way other people do their work. Publication also hones the skills of the faculty, validates significance and originality and enhances future grantsmanship.
Q. Essentially it puts them in the group of peers rather suddenly and abruptly; it’s an apprenticeship.
Pladziewicz: The connection to publication and dissemination is so important, and it’s subtle in some ways because you could do all of the same activities, you could even be doing original research, but if the professor has no intention of publishing, it loses some of the seriousness, and the students sense it. If nothing is published from that laboratory, there’s a different sense about the importance of the work they’re doing, and that is so crucial, yet not as well understood as it might be in terms of building people who become very productive professionals. Without publication there is no validation or feedback on the intellectual merit of the work.
Q. How has RCSA changed in the seven years you’ve been here?
Pladziewicz: There has been a greater emphasis in recent years on the connection between funding research proposals and faculty and student development. Our review process has always focused on funding the best research, but recently we’ve looked a lot more sharply at the impact of our funding on faculty and student development.
The Foundation has always been interested in both of those aspects of funding research. My personal experience was that Brian Andreen, who was the longest-serving program officer for the Foundation that I know of, visited me several times at my laboratory in Eau Clare, and asked about my work. Later in my career, sometimes with my knowledge and sometimes without it, he promoted me in one way or another -- advocated for me to be included in a symposium, or to be appointed to an advisory committee, something of that sort. All of those things helped me develop my career. So I think there has always been a career development aspect to the Foundation, but a lot of times even the people working here didn’t recognize it as such. They understood they were doing that, but it wasn’t a published goal of the Foundation. Recently, it’s become a more public part of the mission. We’re saying we fund research, but we realize that because we’re dealing primarily in seed grants to early career faculty that this is an important component of building their careers, of helping them develop over time, of helping them to become models in their own departments and, more broadly, for the best kind of teaching and top-quality research and the connection between the two. The two -- teaching and research -- are inseparable in the sciences.
It’s very hard, in my opinion, to be the most complete kind of teacher-scholar unless you do scholarship, true scholarship, publish the work, and engage students in it. The Foundation has always supported that model. We understand the connection of research grants and research proposals with faculty development and then student development. They’re inseparable.
Q. If you were to do an identical twin experiment in which Twin A engaged in real research and Twin B engaged in a top-quality research-like process, would real research turn out to be the superior teaching method?
Pladziewicz: That information is hard to come by because there’s such a variety of faculty in PUIs for example. And good teachers make a difference, regardless of whether they’re actively engaged in research. But they add another dimension when they can engage students in publishable research. So my gut tells me it probably does make a difference -- it certainly did make a difference for the students who worked with me. [RCSA President] Jim Gentile would say that he believes the ability to bring work to publication and to have students as coauthors on his papers was an important milestone in their development. It would have left them without something important had they just gone through all of that same experience, more or less, but without closing the circle by bringing it to publication. The consequences of that for the students are huge, although it’s hard to say something definitive with absolute certainty.
I don’t have any doubt about it for the faculty, though. Because if I remain active in research, I’m going to remain current in my discipline and I’m going to have an excitement in what I’m doing that’s not going to dim over a 30-year career. Active research requires being current with the field in a way that simply integrating the most current texts – which are typically 5-10 years behind the research literature – cannot possibly do. It’s harder to imagine somebody being as excited and remaining as engaged over a 30-year career doing more or less the same thing every year without advancing a research project in parallel with his or her teaching. But then again, there are some extraordinarily good teachers out there who are not researchers.
Q. RCSA’s mission includes funding the best science, but it also includes advancing the cause of science in this country, which I would assume means coming up with the best experience for science students.
Pladziewicz: Right. There’s a bit of a dilemma there, obviously. Let’s say that you had somebody who is absolutely out-of-the-box brilliant and has an idea that appears potentially transformational. You have the choice of funding that person or somebody else who also is a very good scientist but who clearly is going to be a much more balanced teacher-scholar. What would we do? That would be a real dilemma, because we’d want to do both. Our goal is to advance science, and if the perception is that we could advance it more in one venue than the other, we’d be torn between trying to fund the outstanding researcher and the person who will broaden impact through more effective interaction with students. In my opinion, over time the Foundation has come down on the side of the teacher-scholar, although in our highly competitive Cottrell Scholar program we strive to accomplish both by selecting teacher-scholars with extraordinary research potential.
A component of every one of our programs is a consideration of what sort of impact each will have on postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students. We don’t fund people at national laboratories. We don’t fund people at think tanks, and there may be some people there who are the best scientists in the world, but they don’t have the educational component. They don’t have the teaching side, so we don’t fund them. As I understand the Foundation, we are trying to advance science through the academic model. And so that means driving both the quality of the teaching in all respects and the integration of teaching and research at all levels, from the PUIs up through the research universities.
Q. How has your work at RCSA changed over the seven or so years you’ve been here?
Pladziewicz: Because of the change in the Foundation’s presidential leadership and the resulting strategic planning, we’ve been challenged to re-examine every program that we have, to evaluate strengths and weaknesses in the process of making corrections and investigating new opportunities. Scialog, our newest program, is an example of that. Scialog bears some of the characteristics of earlier programs we’ve had, in particular the Innovation Awards. The last five years have been a time of blending some of the best components of the traditional with new ideas and trying to reinvent them. In the past year or so, that’s been happening in the face of widespread financial difficulties and more limited resources. As we’ve gone through this period of financial crisis, we’ve had to be much more concerned about how resources are applied to the Foundation’s mission.
We’ve come to understand better the value of getting harder data or more quantitative data on what our impact has been. And for two reasons: The first reason is to be convinced that we’re doing the right thing and to continue to modify and improve the programs going forward. But also to then provide a more forceful example to others. For example, if changes that we’ve made in our multi-investigator Cottrell College program prove to be very successful and we can measure that, there’s a much better chance that other foundations and perhaps even federal agencies will apply more resources to that. So not only is our seed money magnified by the individual faculty member going out and gaining more resources by himself or herself by virtue of our support early on, but now other agencies step in and say this is successful, this works, this is something we should apply our resources to in a larger way. The word “catalytic” then applies because you have an influence far beyond the initial activity, and you amplify your impact.
Another aspect of assessment is that it’s absolutely essential if you want a partner, if you want to raise money, if you want to recover from the financial crisis. You cannot do that unless you can tell a potential donor or partner how you know what you’re doing is actually working. Stories are important because they motivate people, but anecdotal material only goes so far. According to the research I’ve seen, 65-70 percent of people are motivated by quantitative, data-driven arguments. So there has to be a mix of anecdotes and data. RCSA’s history is composed of a long string of success stories, but now we’re trying to build the other side of that, because our president and others have been asking sharply focused questions aimed at documenting our impact, and we’re nowhere near being done with that process.
The process of assessment is based on establishing a baseline, and in the Foundation’s case that would seem to be the people who came to RCSA and didn’t get funded. Did our people succeed to a greater degree than they did? We do not have much data about that. We believe they have because there are anecdotal examples that are somewhat quantitative, they’re somewhat on the boundary between the anecdotal and the numerical. For example, take the fact that nine out of the 12 plenary lecturers at a recent Gordon Conference on solar fuels were former RCSA awardees. We fund only about one quarter of the applications we receive, but yet we see in something like that, that three quarters of the top people are ones we’ve funded. Those two facts taken together say that we’re having an impact; although probably the biggest factor is that we’re good at picking people who are smarter, more driven, or possess whatever the key components are.
Q. But that’s a valid function, too, when it comes to advancing science, isn’t it?
Pladziewicz: Yes, if you have limited resources, you certainly want to apply them to the people most likely to translate them into something significant. And there’s good evidence, both anecdotal and quantitative, that the Foundation has done that. With a potential fundraising campaign and efforts to partner looming, we need both the good anecdotal stories and we need to support them with quantitative data. We have worked hard in the last year to do that.
Q. Part of the RCSA tradition requires program officers to make campus visits, and you’ve made your fair share. In the broadest terms, what do you take away from that experience?
Pladziewicz: You can go into a school that is pretty weak by whatever measures you want to apply, and you’ll find some people who just soldier through all that and succeed no matter what -- a few people who are just absolutely irrepressible. But what generally happens if the Foundation gets involved with a week PUI is that the institution will not be transformed. If you want to move beyond what I call random acts of research by these exceptional people who come along now and then, you have to change institutional culture. Institutions that value scholarship and research with students move beyond random acts of research to make it part and parcel of their culture -- schools like Williams College or Western Washington University, where we did a Departmental Development Grant, or Harvey Mudd, Pomona, or Illinois State -- the top places. When you walk into a place where scholarship and research are part of the culture, nobody has to explain what the expectations are, because everybody knows. You walk into a place where that’s not the case, and you’ll get a very different description of what a person needs to do to make tenure, for example, or to be promoted -- for some it will be this, and for some it will be that. But at a place where scholarship and research are part of the culture, it’s understood by everybody, and it very quickly becomes clear to anybody who’s hired.
There are some places, because of the power of a provost, a president or a dean, who really sees scholarship as crucial. You can’t force everything from the top, but you can broaden good things across the whole institution from leadership positions. So it’s important which departments and which individuals are recognized and receive resources from a provost, a president or a dean and how they receive those resources. It’s also crucial what these administrators do about hiring, which is the most fundamental way to change an institution. And so the hiring practices of an institution, what people are told at the time of hiring, and then how the institution follows through on that over the probationary period leading to tenure, tells you the story of the institution and, probably, its future. Strong leaders attract strong faculty and top faculty with good leadership attract resources and flourish.
It starts with communication. If you don’t communicate to individuals when they come in the door what the expectations are, how are they going to know whether they can live up to those expectations, how are they going to know whether it’s even what they want? Clarity of purpose is a cornerstone success.
Q. Any additional thoughts on your role within the Foundation?
Pladziewicz: I’d like to think that I’ve kept my eye on the ball, which is the mission of the foundation, namely to advance the integration of research and teaching. I don’t feel like I’ve changed, other than to appreciate and understand other people’s points of view better over time on how the Foundation can influence things. People before me at the Foundation, like Brian Andreen, Ray Kellman, John Schaefer and Mike Doyle, fully understood the importance of the Foundation’s ability to change U.S. academia, and I learned a great deal from each of them.
And in recent years, my mind has been opened up to the importance of formally recognizing the faculty development side of what we do and how research and teaching can be integrated in U.S. colleges and universities. So while I‘ve learned and I‘ve grown during my time at RCSA, my understanding of our core mission has stayed the same. Our purpose is to advance science through integrating research and teaching in U.S. academic institutions and building best practices.
Q. How are you planning to spend your retirement?
Pladziewicz: More time with family, more outdoor activities. We love doing things outdoors, and as long as I’m healthy enough to do it, skiing, kayaking, biking, hiking, those kinds of things. And travel. To the degree that we remain healthy in the coming five to 10 years Barb and I will get a chance to do a lot more of that.
We’ve promised our three grandchildren that when they hit that 13-to-14-year age we’re going to take each one individually where they want to go. Each one gets to choose a place, and we’re going to go for a week or two with them, just one at a time, so we can devote all of our energy to them.