Jaylan Turkkan has served as vice president for research since Oct. 1. She has an extensive record as an academic researcher at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a research administrator at the National Institutes of Health.

	Turkkan

Tell me about the Research Festival set for May 16-17.

For the first time ever, UB will host a research festival to celebrate the accomplishments of its newest investigators, as well as highlight state-of-the-art research in drug discovery and information technology at UB. This is the first of what I'm hoping is going to be an annual event. This is going to be a celebratory thing, and also a vehicle to transmit actual practical information that new investigators-or people that are simply new at UB-can use. We really value new investigators at UB-after all, they're the next generation of researchers here. The entire first day is going to be devoted to practical advice and information for new investigators about, for example, laboratory animal facilities-who do you contact, what can they do for you? The other thing is intellectual property and computing issues. Who do you call? We're going to have booths at the festival for most facilities at UB that support research-the instrumentation centers, the scanning electron microscope, the supercomputing center. We're going to have speakers from the federal agencies talking about career mechanisms and small business grants and everything else investigators need to know to get funding for research. The second day is composed of two symposia: one having to do with "Postgenomics and Bioinformatics" and the other on information technology and computing-related topics. We're also going to have poster sessions by new investigators across all research and creative areas. And do all come!

How much sponsored research do UB-affiliated researchers now bring in each year?

An interesting question, and a much more complex question than one might think. You ask people in government how much they're spending in a particular area, and the joke is, "Do you want a big number or a small number?" It depends on how you look at it. When you say sponsored research, does that mean how much you're awarded? How much you're expending? Government works on an award model and academia works on an expenditure model. Do you want to know how many awards? Or do you want to know only at UB or, for example, UB faculty also working at Roswell, or including those at the affiliated hospitals? It's complex. In 1999-2000, UB-affiliated faculty recorded $142 million in sponsored-research expenditures.

With our strengths, how much money should we be bringing in?

I think we ought to be thinking about doubling our research expenditure between five to seven years from now. It may seem overly ambitious, but given the incredible breadth and interdisciplinary activity that's going on here, as we improve the processes by which people interact and learn what each other is doing, we're going to be able to compete for larger and larger awards.

What is the "Hopkins mentality"?

Because I came from the Johns Hopkins medical school, there was a certain level of expectation about how independent you were supposed to be as a researcher. That expectation was that you were supposed to bring in all the money you needed to bring in to cover your salary, to cover all the salaries of everybody working under you, and all of the money you needed to do your research. It was in a way an entrepreneurial approach to doing science. It's like you own a store in a mall and you rise and fall by how well your business goes-if you can't sell the stuff in your store, you're out the door. There's nobody subsidizing you. That's the Hopkins mentality-it's the old "rugged individualism." I thought this was the way everybody behaved. That (notion) was ingrained because I was there for so long-You're on your own and don't expect anybody to do anything for you. I come here and I get this very interesting attitude that people expect the administration to support some of their activities. It's (self-sufficiency) a message they're not used to. That is coupled with an unfortunate low self-esteem-they (researchers) feel like they shouldn't ask the government for a lot of money because they don't deserve a lot of money.

Is there an attitude at UB that "we're not good enough"?

We are good enough. I'm starting to develop this line of "Who knew?" Every time I go around campus, I discover something fascinating, people who are doing amazing research. I think, "who knew this was here?" The SUNY chancellor came to campus recently and he visited the supercomputing center, the handwriting recognition center and the industrial design center, and he kept saying, "Who knew this was here?" This place is the best kept secret in town. Part of my job is to get the word out about all the exciting things that are happening here. How am I going to do that? We're going to use the research festival as an opportunity to reach out to the local business community and link them up with our young researchers and get some excitement going about what we do and what we know. In addition, we're going to have a digital summit Nov. 2-3 on what is available and out there today-not only what UB researchers are doing, but also others around the country in terms of high-tech, high-performance computing, and what are the implications for the future of these digital tools. What does telemedicine mean for doctor-patient communication? What is distance learning doing for teacher-student relations? What does virtual reality mean for living your life out in virtual space? We're going to invite science-fiction writers and cultural anthropologists. It's not only about the tech and the tools and the toys, it's about the implications of all of this for our privacy, for our definitions of what it means to be a human, what it means to be part of society interacting with other people in a social network. It's not only an excuse to trot out all of our fun stuff, but to get a lot of smart people here and talk about these issues. That's another way I want to get the word out about UB and what we're doing here.

Tell me about the Savvy P.I. Project.

I find that people do not know how the (funding) agencies operate; they think it's a big black box. They think they throw their grants into this big black box and what comes out the other end is almost a crap shoot. They're not confident about a fair process; they're not confident about peer review and they certainly don't think they can influence anything about what happens to their grant proposal. Which isn't true. Every step of the way, from the time they get their bright idea to the time they get their notice of grant award, they can influence what happens to their grant. A lot of it has to do with forming relationships with the people at the institutes and at the agencies. It's through those kinds of personal relationships that you get insider information about what's coming down the pike-let's say a special solicitation-that you find out what areas of expertise are on a particular review panel and that the expertise needed to review your grant is not on your review panel and you'd better get on the phone to NIH and make sure they have that expert either sitting at the table or phoning in a review or providing a mail-in review. They (investigators) need to know when to start hassling the program officers at the institutes after the reviews are done to influence the outcome of their funding decisions, especially if they got a borderline score. They have to get on the phone, and they have to send an email lobbying for their grant proposals. They need to push their stuff every step of the way. All of these decisions influence whether you get money at the end of the day. Every agency has its own culture and you need to learn what that culture is and you need to network and you need to influence. That's what I'm calling the Savvy P.I. project-I'm trying to go around giving talks about how you can influence what happens to your grant.

What's the greatest challenge you face in revving up the sponsored research operation at UB?