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Questions &Answers
Jorge V. José has served as vice president for research since August 1.
How much sponsored research do UB-affiliated researchers now bring
in each year?
In FY 2004, UB research and development
expenditures, as reported in the National Science Foundation R&D survey,
totaled almost $259 million. That does not include an additional $10
million in support for the arts, humanities and professional schools
that are not captured in the NSF report. That's an increase of almost
40 percent over the past four years.
How can we leverage our funding efforts?
We've been relatively successful in terms of single
investigator, single grant per investigator, but we need to be more
aggressive in competing for multiple grants per investigator, in
particular NIH R01 grants, and for multi-investigator, center-type
grants. For example, we have two excellent IGERT grants; there's no
reason why we couldn't have six or seven.
You've said that you want UB to increase the number of
multidisciplinary grants researchers bring in. Is multidisciplinary the
wave of the future, in terms of grant proposals and awards?
As
several government funding agencies have made clear, and as the National
Institutes of Health roadmap emphasizes, research in the 21st century
will be heavily multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary,
interdisciplinary, whatever terminology you prefer. For UB to remain
competitive, we have to encourage and catalyze such interactions among
faculty in different disciplines and reward them accordingly.
You've instituted three new programs designed to encourage and
increase research and scholarly activity. Tell me about them.
One of the most important things the Office of the Vice President
for Research can do is provide the resources needed to get new projects
off the ground. External funding agencies are like any other type of
investor; they are cautious about investing too early. I have instituted
three new internal seed-funding mechanisms to help faculty increase
their competitiveness for winning external funding for exciting new
research and scholarship. The UB 2020 Scholars Fund is intended to
provide resources to support academic excellence in research and
scholarly activities that are aligned with one or more of the UB 2020
strategic strengths. These seed grants will provide funding to allow the
development of ideas to enhance the chance of external funding. However,
awards also will be made in areas where external funding is rare. The
deadline for submission in this program is Jan. 13, 2006. The second
program funds research collaborations by faculty in different
specialties. The Interdisciplinary Research Development Fund (IRDF) was
created because external funding agencies are continuing to shift their
focus from awarding single-investigator grants to those that fund teams
with a range of expertise. The intent of this program is to catalyze
collaborations between faculty in different disciplines that will lead
to new research and scholarly projects and increase the probability of
getting competitive external grant funding. Like the Scholars Fund, IRDF
proposals must be aligned with the strengths identified in the UB 2020
strategic plan. The deadline for IRDF submissions was Nov. 1, and 54
proposals were submitted. Finally, my most important initiative is a
program that will provide resources to help faculty win large
multi-investigator grants that provide more than $1 million of total
funding per year. This program, called Multi-Investigator Proposal
Support, or MIPS for short, will provide much-needed support for faculty
involved in putting together large funding proposals. To be successful
at winning these large interdisciplinary awards, the university research
enterprise must facilitate an environment in which multiple
investigators from various departments and schools can unite to create
collaborative efforts to address critical national research problems.
The Office of the Vice President for Research has resources to assist in
the formation and support of research teams that wish to develop
multi-disciplinary, center-level grant applications. Our office is ready
to hear from groups of investigators that already have well-formed ideas
of what they want to do, or from groups that want to crystallize an
incipient idea into a well-thought-out grant project. There is no
deadline to be considered for the MIPS program.
It's traditionally been tougher for humanities faculty to attract
external funding. How are you assisting these faculty members?
We have an excellent tradition and excellent faculty in the arts and
humanities. It's true that funding in those areas is less prevalent than
in the life and physical sciences. To the extent that support is
available, we will assist faculty to seek it out; our UB 2020 Scholars
Fund program may be of particular assistance in this area. However, it's
not necessarily appropriate or desirable to measure progress in the arts
and humanities by the amount of external support that's attracted. We
will look at publications, projects, national and international
exhibits, performances and recognition by peers and by the public as the
measures that determine faculty scholarly or creative excellence.
What's the status of the merger of Grants and Contracts
Administration and Sponsored Programs Administration—the top
recommendation to come from the Sponsored Programs Improvement
Initiative? When will investigators see a change in the way things are
run?
When I arrived at UB this summer, the consolidation of
these units had been under way since February of this year. I feel the
merged unit will provide improved services and will be very helpful to
principal investigators (PIs) at UB. The consolidation of Grants and
Contracts Services and Sponsored Programs Administration into a single
unit will provide "cradle to grave" support to our PIs. The early stages
of the planning included best-practice interviews with senior research
administrators at several leading universities and a site visit to
Harvard, which recently consolidated its pre- and post-award offices.
Based on experiences from these institutions and input from a UB faculty
group, an organizational structure and a set of staff roles and
responsibilities have been developed. Implementation planning is now
under way. Transition to the new organization, to be known as Sponsored
Project Services, is about to start and should be completed in late
winter. PIs should begin to experience the benefits of integrating pre-
and post-award operations early in the spring semester.
What's the biggest challenge you face in increasing sponsored
research at UB?
We are facing a funding-environment change in
government funding agencies. First, the doubling of funding at NIH has
ended. Although we took advantage of the budget increase at NIH, UB
still has the potential to increase its funding further by motivating
investigators who already are doing excellent work to do more and
finding the means to help them do that. For example, we might provide a
safety net to motivate more NIH-funded PIs to apply for extra funding so
that they will have no problem continuing their research while in
between grants, or encouraging investigators to form interdisciplinary
research groups. This also will provide alternative funding stability
for their research. Our seed-funding initiatives are designed to help
PIs to find new sources of funding for their research. In addition,
we're going to be working closely with the provost and deans to recruit
top-notch faculty to UB who will add their strengths to our existing
programs and take us in new exciting research and scholarly
directions.