Departments

Conversation With The Dean

Celebrating And Investing In Research At SMU

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Q.Why is SMU focusing research on issues in health care, immigration and energy sustainability?

A. Provost Paul Ludden launched planning initiatives on these topics to involve the faculty in identifying immediate, high-profile research opportunities, and to develop strategies that SMU can pursue to engage these issues more broadly and effectively in the future. To advance in stature as a research university, SMU must engage problems that are recognized by society as critically important. This is the key to research success. Important problems capture public attention, and research efforts to solve them attract federal funding.

The provost and I are in complete agreement on this direction for SMU. If you listen to the national news on any evening, you are likely to hear coverage on the crisis in health care, climate change, the impact of immigration and the escalating price of gas. The key is to identify aspects of these problems that we can address now with our current resources, and to plan longer-term strategies that foster growth of research at SMU in areas that will contribute increasingly to significant solutions.

Q. How will your office help faculty attract more grants and funding to support their research?

A. The federal government is the largest sponsor of research in the world, but unfortunately, federal funding for research has not kept pace with expectations. The intensely competitive nature of this environment is demonstrated by the fact that success rates for new proposals to many programs are much less than 20 percent and, in some cases, less than 10 percent. Clearly, increasing grants and funding is going to be difficult and slow at first, and growing research at SMU will not be accomplished by simply writing more proposals.

There are immediate actions that my office will do to help. We will improve the proposal preparation process with an online proposal routing and approval process. We will work with the Office of Grants Accounting to provide timely reporting to researchers on the financial balances in their projects so that funds are not left unspent when the project closes. We will provide better information online to faculty on opportunities and regulations. Lastly, we will expand the Office of Research Administration to more effectively process proposals, to assist faculty in matters of compliance on federal regulations and to launch an effective program of tech transfer.

On a more strategic level, I plan to work with the provost and faculty to identify areas into which SMU research can expand. Ideally, these will be areas that build on existing strengths, contribute to the initiatives established by the provost, and avoid competition head-on with established programs at other universities in our region.

Q. How does research support teaching?

A. Research informs a faculty member’s teaching, and faculty should constantly seek new knowledge so they can provide the most up-todate and accurate information to their students. Many fields, such as computer science and biology, are evolving so fast that a faculty member not engaged in research is teaching material that becomes progressively out of date.

Our research must tackle big problems and engage our students in their solution. No leading research university is without a vigorous graduate program, and graduate education is part of the overall educational experience that the modern American university is expected to provide. In addition to performing much of the research, graduate students directly contribute to the education of undergraduates as instructors, mentors and role models. As we grow research at SMU, I hope that we successfully reach out to undergraduates, capture their imaginations and draw them into the excitement encourage dialogue between our faculty and federal funding agencies that may lead to new funding initiatives, and dialogue with the private sector that may lead to research partnerships.We need to seek opportunities for collaboration with other Metroplex universities and utilize innovative collaborations within SMU that transcend traditional discipline boundaries. My hope is that this office also will find resources to fund pilot studies, to enable faculty participation in federal programmatic planning exercises, and to provide matching funds to increase the competitiveness of our proposals.