Departments

Conversation With The Dean

Celebrating And Investing In Research At SMU

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Q. If a key to SMU’s future is its investment in research today, how will you rely on the fund-raising initiatives of the upcoming Second Century Campaign to help support that?

A. Research is a business that cannot be grown without investment. A gift given in the interest of building the research enterprise is a gift that will go on giving by enabling the University to attract more federal funding in future years. That said, I have identified several broad targets for support from the campaign.

Investment in Faculty   From benchmark universities, it is clear that research activity in terms of grant dollars expended increases exponentially with increasing number of faculty conducting research in fields that have federal dollars available. This is strong evidence that SMU must increase the size of the faculty in the sciences and engineering if we want to reach a target of $50 million per year in research expenditures.

Investment In Graduate Education  Graduate students are the muscle that performs much of the research at universities. SMU needs to develop funding for fellowships so that our stipends allow us to compete for top graduate students.

Investment In Infrastructure  National Science Foundation statistics show that for every $1 million in research conducted, about 5,000 square feet of laboratory space is required. So, to support $50 million in annual research expenditures, we will have to double the amount of lab space at SMU from 125,000 to 250,000 square feet! That’s a challenge, because lab space is expensive. We need to take a hard look at that “traditional” laboratory model and consider alternatives that could increase research at SMU without requiring so much up-front investment on infrastructure. One alternative that stands out would be to emphasize growth in the computationally intensive subdisciplines of the sciences and engineering. Every field in science and engineering has an aspect that’s highly dependent on significant computing muscle, and investment in a highperformance computing center would enable us to significantly expand research in those areas. Although we must not abandon laboratory-based research, a high-performance computing center would cost only a fraction of the price of 125,000 square feet of new lab space. A high-performance computing facility could open up new fields for SMU such as bioinformatics, climate modeling, modeling of large economic markets, traffic modeling, petroleum basin and aquifer modeling, and creation of improved virtual reality training modules for psychology and education. And faculty across the University could benefit immediately from access to the center. For example, the Physics Department, which lacks the computing power to process large volumes of data, would be able to engage the CERN Large Hadron Collider experiment (see article on page 14) at a high level, increasing the profile of SMU as a research university.

Q. A University goal is to strengthen scholarly research and creative achievement. How does this fit into the strategic plan to increase academic quality at SMU?

A. Expansion of research at SMU is necessary if we are to improve our standing in the ranks of U.S. universities. Although not the only way to track the level of scholarly activity, research expenditures constitute the metric most commonly used to compare university research activity and impact.

Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation between research expenditures and perceived academic quality. Virtually all of the top 50 universities in the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings do more than $50 million of sponsored research a year. These are institutions that also house top programs in the humanities and arts. It is clear that a strong research program is no deterrent to academic excellence in other fields and probably indirectly promotes their success. Increased funding for research creates a new revenue stream and translates into more publications, greater visibility for the University and more faculty and graduate students with whom undergraduates can interact.

The U.S. News’ rankings are not the only metric to which we should pay attention. The Carnegie Institute publishes a classification of universities that contributes to public perception of institutional quality. To be classified among the highest-performing research universities, an institution must have research expenditures exceeding $50 million per year. Rice and Notre Dame, which have no medical schools and are comparable to SMU in size, perform $60 million to $85 million a year in federally funded research. That’s a range to which SMU can aspire.