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Science Issues
Creating Future Science: The Role of Private Foundations in Shaping Research Activities at PUIs
by Silvia Ronco
Among the many challenges American science faces these days is a scarcity of research funds (public and private) at the very time the nation urgently needs a well-trained workforce to help it maintain a leading role in research, as other nations rapidly develop their scientific and technological infrastructures. Also today, perhaps more than ever, major scientific challenges are deeply intertwined with societal needs. Yet because of our past research successes, today's scientific challenges are increasingly complex, and thus require the combined efforts of scientists from different fields and the use of truly interdisciplinary approaches.
For example, solar energy conversion-vitally important to a global economy potentially facing "peak oil" shortages-is now being tackled by communities of chemists, physicists, materials scientists, and engineers, among others, who are pursuing the same goals but using different concepts and tools. In coming together over the pinch points blocking greater efficiencies in solar conversion, these communities are nurturing intellectual flexibility and, potentially, new hybrid disciplines with their own technical terminologies and new ways of looking at seemingly intractable problems.
A number of top educational institutions are making good progress at encouraging these communities of interest among scientists. For example, the University of Arizona has created the BIO5 Institute to take advantage of the power of the genetic paradigm to encourage cross-fertilization among researchers in biology, medicine, pharmacy, agriculture, basic science, and engineering. And the small, private foundation for which I work, Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), is getting into the boundary-crossing game with a new program called Scialog, derived from the words "science" and "dialog." Scialog brings together early-career researchers from multiple disciplines and encourages the formation of investigative teams to look at major problems under the general heading of global climate change. RCSA President James Gentile calls the program "an experiment in developing new communities of inquiry for 21st-century science."
Of course, cross-disciplinary communities are not new in the history of science, as is demonstrated by the existence of molecular biology, biochemistry, and materials science. What is new, it seems, is the sense of urgency that comes with the realization that we are facing a broad set of difficult problems on this finite planet with its burgeoning human population. This sense of urgency has given rise to calls for scientific research that is much more deliberately "transformative" in its goals.
What does that mean, precisely? According to a 2007 National Science Board report:
Transformative research is defined as research driven by ideas that have the potential to radically change our understanding of an important existing scientific or engineering concept or leading to the creation of a new paradigm or field of science or engineering. Such research also is characterized by its challenge to current understanding or its pathway to new frontiers.
Or, as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAA&S) defines it, transformative research has "the potential to generate deep changes in concepts, to produce new tools or instrumentation that will allow the entire community to extend its reach, to create a new subfield, or to bring together different fields to make discoveries that would otherwise be impossible." (Advancing Research in Science and Engineering, AAA&S, 2008)
What these two definitions lack is a phrase or two emphasizing the necessity of risk in transformative research. As quoted in the AAA&S "ARISE" report cited above, Albert Einstein said it best: "If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." Funding truly transformative research means taking risks and learning to live with a higher percentage of "failed" experiments. Of course, no well-designed experiment is a failure, because researchers learn new science even when the results don't turn out as hypothesized. Even federal funding agencies, traditionally criticized by some in the research community as being too conservative in doling out tax dollars, are warming to the idea of taking on more risk, as evidenced by the creation of programs such as the NIH Pioneer Award and the NSF Transformative Research Initiative, among others.
Why is RCSA determined that America's PUIs must be positioned to become a global wellspring of transformative science? It is an urgent matter of national security and prosperity in an era when other nations are rapidly improving their scientific and technological infrastructures. The AAA&S's 2008 report puts it well:
We strongly believe that, regardless of overall federal research funding levels, America must invest in young scientists and transformative research in order to sustain its ability to compete in the new global environment.
The PUI Context
PUI faculty members may, in fact, potentially have more flexibility than their colleagues at research universities to conduct high-risk research that may lead to breakthrough discoveries. This is due to an institutional culture that emphasizes both teaching and research activities and where faculty success is not usually tightly connected with a principal investigator's ability to secure large federal grants.
In many cases, however, PUI faculty members have not yet left the traditional comfort zone of working individually in well-defined disciplines, a move that is increasingly seen as necessary to achieve one's full potential. Although support of cutting-edge research in interdisciplinary fields has been identified as a major priority by prominent groups and committees (Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research, The National Academies, 2004), there is still department-level resistance and a notorious lack of funding opportunities for academic scientists who want to conduct this type of research.
It is fair to say that PUI science faculty members have relied largely on private foundations to establish, grow, and sustain their research. For example, in the last decade alone, RCSA through its 50-year-old Cottrell College Science Award (CCSA) program, has helped early-career faculty at hundreds of PUIs develop research programs. Thus, the current situation presents an excellent opportunity for progressively minded, non-risk-averse foundations to further shape the future of science by challenging bright scientists to conduct potentially transformative, interdisciplinary research. By taking this approach, RCSA is also helping PUI undergraduate research move to the next level of excellence.
RCSA's focus on early-career researchers is a longstanding tradition, but it is a need that still demands our attention. As the ARISE report observes:
Today's early career faculty will be responsible for our country's future science and technology discoveries and for the education of our future Ph.D.-level scientists and engineers. Yet they face greater obstacles than their more senior colleagues in securing research grants to inaugurate what should be one of the most productive stages in their careers.
Although the CCSA program continues to be successful, RCSA feels that because America's leadership in scientific research is increasingly challenged by rising knowledge and talent abroad, it is imperative to change the way research is conducted and planned at PUIs.
Instead of funding a wide range of individually formulated projects, the foundation, through an offshoot of the CCSA program called Multi Investigator CCSA (MI-CCSA), intends to challenge the PUI community to engage in more high-risk, potentially high-yield research activities. Federal agencies such as the NSF and NIH have invested large sums to make this happen in our nation's research universities. But what about the PUIs? Are they embracing the cross-disciplinary, team-based teacher/scholar model? Perhaps not so much.
In the MI-CCSA model, faculty members are encouraged to form teams driven by the power of new technologies, our growing understanding of the inherent complexity of nature, and the resulting desire to explore complex problems that are not confined to a single discipline. Obviously, this approach necessitates partnering with faculty members from different departments and disciplines to take advantage of in-house resources.
While RCSA sees its mission of advancing science, in part, as aiding in the creation of widespread new communities of knowledge, the foundation believes that in order to build a national institutional-research culture that embraces cross-disciplinary, frontier research, it is also important to lay the foundations for these communities by establishing in-house collaborations that will impact both research and teaching activities. That is what the MI-CCSA program is intended to do. RCSA believes a solid commitment to interdisciplinary research conducted within a given PUI will do much to advance science and improve twenty-first century science education.
Adjusting Policies and Practices
The National Academies issued a 2004 report, Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research, that called for academic institutions to develop and strengthen existing policies and practices that lower or remove barriers to interdisciplinary work. The report also recommended that institutions make appropriate use of lessons learned from the interdisciplinary work performed in industrial and national laboratories.
Along those lines, for decades RCSA has worked closely with the scientific community and encouraged senior faculty members to support beginning researchers in all aspects of career development, from grant and contract writing to dealing with undergraduates and administrators. AAA&S takes that further, calling for increasing the profile of good mentors with awards and other forms of recognition, saying "Effective mentoring will result in more successful hiring of top candidates, and enhance the reputations of departments and institutions."
As shown in a number of surveys, PUI faculty members usually identify lack of infrastructure, lack of time, and lack of an institutional reward system as the most common barriers to conducting undergraduate research at their institutions (K.K.Karukstis et al., 2009). Thus it is incumbent upon administrations at PUIs to make sure that adequate instrumentation is up and running, facilities are designed for maximum interaction among disciplines, and, most importantly, collaborating faculty members are supported by a structure that increases emphasis on scholarship rather than simply looking to teaching as the most important part of a promotion and tenure process. In order to keep faculty members motivated to conduct cutting-edge research, institutions will need to rethink the way they assess faculty members' success, especially promotion and tenure policies for early-career faculty.
Personnel systems and criteria should reward quality over quantity in evaluating publications; scientist-scholars should be encouraged to become part of multi-investigator initiatives, and, when needed, to team-teach courses without being penalized for not showing individual professional activities. This type of model calls for a looser institutional structure without the traditional departmental boundaries, as well as open communication lines within science divisions and among college administrators. Faculty members need to feel challenged and supported by their administrators! RCSA firmly believes this type of synergy usually leads to solid research programs.
Creating an in-house, highly collaborative research culture also requires that deans and chairs think strategically about new faculty hires. What skills will a new hire bring that complement the existing research environment? What areas of research are necessary to adapt existing research and teaching activities to modern science?
How does RCSA benefit by funding new approaches? First, it is essential to the foundation's overall mission of advancing science to assist researchers in making great discoveries by supporting frontier, high-risk research. Because private foundations usually award smaller dollar amounts than federal agencies, their grant programs are ideal for providing seed money to explore new ideas for which no results have yet been achieved-research often best tackled by early-career faculty. This type of funding is attractive to early-career scientists by giving them the opportunity to think outside the usual paradigms, not a trivial advantage in today's era of generally conservative federal funding decisions.
By asking highly qualified PI's to think creatively and take risks, we are investing our funds in research projects with potentially high payoffs, studies with a decent likelihood of generating high-quality, publishable results. At the very least, the foundation hopes to avoid the conservative thinking often present in federal agencies and during peer review that discourages faculty members from taking risks. "Don't put it in your grant unless you know it will work" too often guides both early-career and established researchers, as the ARISE report and others have noted.
Will the RCSA approach transform science? Sometimes. But even if it doesn't, a project that deliberately seeks to be transformative may be the start of a creative and productive long-term program, demonstrating to federal agencies that relevant research can be conducted at the PUI level and giving faculty members funding opportunities that are typically available mostly to the top research institutions. With today's anticipated scarcity of research funds, it becomes increasingly important to show that PUIs are up to the task of conducting significant research and that their faculty members are active participants in topics associated with science's grand challenges. As a small, private foundation, RCSA can provide resources to start these projects; the ability of our awardees to attract subsequent funding is a measure of the success of our programs.
Teaching Science
By doing this, RCSA is helping to shape the future of science, and it is enabling faculty members and administrators to engage in building new communities of knowledge. Part of that building process fundamentally involves nurturing the use of interdisciplinary approaches in science teaching as well. In addition to providing needed research funds, the CCSA program has been instrumental in helping faculty members promote the teacher/scholar model among college administrators, trustees, and state legislators.
By supporting interdisciplinary and transformative research within the teacher/scholar model prevalent at PUIs, RCSA believes it is helping to improve the way science is taught. The foundation traditionally has maintained that better scholars are also better teachers: They are better informed about the cutting-edge issues of their science, and they are generally more enthusiastic and thus better able to engage undergraduates in hands-on activities in their research projects and in the classroom.
This approach fits nicely with the foundation's long-time commitment to building active undergraduate research communities through faculty development and student involvement. Participating undergraduates benefit hugely from these types of activities by experiencing first-hand how it feels to think like a scientist up against a real problem, rather than merely thinking about science or about the next science exam. It puts eager undergraduates in a strong position to identify great science as a target for their future graduate work.
As the AAA&S has noted:
The nation needs to do a better job of attracting "the best and the brightest" to embark on careers as science and engineering faculty. Young scientists are needed for two reasons: (1) to ensure a sufficient number of U.S. researchers for the future, and (2) to increase the chances for fresh, path-breaking ideas and transforming approaches to meeting twenty-first-century challenges to our economic vitality, environment, security, health care system, and way of life. (ARISE, 2008)
The foundation benefits in this process because high-risk, potentially transformative, interdisciplinary research with undergraduate participation is an aggressive way to create a well-educated workforce that is prepared to tackle challenging projects and increasingly complex problems that require a set of diverse skills. It is the very essence of long-term scientific advancement.
RCSA is not alone in its desire to see undergraduate research across disciplines. In May 2008, a consortium led by the National Science Foundation issued recommendations for, among other things, advancing interdisciplinary research and the curricula associated with it at our nation's colleges and universities. The NSF recommended developing short-, intermediate- and long-term measures of the success of interdisciplinary undergraduate research, as well as increasing the numbers of grants supporting interdisciplinary research and training clusters (IGERT, 2008).
The last two decades have seen such a dramatic expansion of undergraduate research activities at PUIs, both inside and outside the science departments, that now nearly all PUIs have active summer programs and promote undergraduate research as a highly efficient way of teaching and learning (Wedin, 2006). In addition, team-teaching has become a common practice in universities and colleges, allowing students to learn to tackle a problem from different points of view, even when the instructors come from scientific disciplines within the same boundaries. In the transformational model discussed here, undergraduates, both in summer programs and during the academic year, would benefit enormously from being mentored by faculty members with different educational backgrounds. Research universities already use this model, as evidenced by the widespread presence of interdisciplinary centers and institutes.
In the end, all parts of America's scientific infrastructure will benefit from the synergy of collaborative faculty/student projects, both in research and in education. But if this new mix of interdisciplinary, transformative research and the corresponding undergraduate programs is to be successful, administrators and faculty members must be on the same page and commit resources to the enterprise. Historically, the foundation has invested resources in institutional, faculty, and student development; RCSA's commitment to support PUI faculty will continue as long as the PUI community shows the same level of commitment.
RCSA TRANSFORMATIVE RESEARCH AT A GLANCE
Research Corporation for Science Advancement sponsors transformative research at primarily undergraduate institutions to:
- Challenge institutions to move to "the next level"
- Foster the best possible teacher-scholars
- Encourage creative thinking
- Encourage risk-taking
- Foster interdisciplinary collaborations and dialogue
- Expose the next generation of scientists to the best modern science
- Prepare our future scientific workforce
Advancing Research In Science and Engineering Report (ARISE), Investing in Early-Career Scientists and High-Risk, High-Reward Research. 2008. American Academy of Arts and Science report.
Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research. 2004. The National Academies of Science.
Impact of Transformative Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate education on Academic Institutions (IGERT), 2008. National Science Foundation workshop report.
K. K. Karukstis, T. E. Elgren, S. E. Ronco, S. E. Feller, and R. S. Rowlett. 2009. "Barriers to
Seeking External Research Funding: Perceptions and Facts," Journal of Chemical Education, 86,
788-790.
R. Wedin. 2006. "Behind Door No. 2: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Science Education," Research Corporation for Science Advancement Annual Report.