Van Dam aims for impact: top faculty and grad students, research awards, visibility

On Oct. 1, Andries van Dam, the Thomas J. Watson Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education and professor of computer science at Brown, began serving in his new post as vice president for research. The George Street Journal’s Mark Nickel recently spoke with van Dam about the process that led to his taking the job, and the vision van Dam has for research at Brown.

Could we start by how you came to this? It’s a dramatic step for Brown.

I hope it will prove to be so – and a step in the right direction.

I got an e-mail from the provost’s office asking me to consider applying. I responded that I had done enough administration. I was computer science chair for nine years and ran a national research center for computer graphics encompassing five universities for three years, so I had zero plans to do anything more in administration.

But [Assistant Provost] Brian Casey said, “Well, you ought to at least write something up about your ideas and what you’d like to see accomplished. Even if you’re not interested in the job, what you write could help stimulate the process.” So as I got into it, being mildly obsessive, I wasn’t content with a one-page outline. It became something like a five-page memo. This was by e-mail in August, when I was consulting at Microsoft Research, which is what I do for a couple weeks every summer.

So writing that memo was what got you hooked?

Yes. I thought that well, since I’d gone to the trouble of preparing the memo, I might as well have fun in the interview. So I went in. I had no reason to believe I would get the job or take the job, because I wanted to remain a faculty member. I didn’t want to give up my teaching and my research. In my first conversation with [Provost] Bob [Zimmer], he said he had been vice president for research and deputy provost at Chicago and that he had continued his research and teaching. He said there was no reason for me to give up something that he hadn’t given up, knowing something about my energy level.

So the University agreed to your request. Did you feel your arm’s-length stance giving way?

Yes. At that point I realized the fat was in the fire and this was going to be a serious conversation. At the outset I said I couldn’t possibly do this job without a solid, well-coordinated infrastructure within my office. Initially, I will have four direct reports – for communications and program development, for research administration, for intellectual property and technology transfer, and for proposal writing. It may take a while to get the infrastructure in place and running, and we may have to make adjustments, but I believe that structure will get us off to a good start.

And beyond infrastructure?

The whole reason for creating this office was to give greater prominence to the Graduate School and the research function at the University. That inevitably means, to my mind, more resources. I’d have to say that the dean of the Graduate School and research has been starved for resources over the years.

Where will you start?

We could start by defining what it means to become a really first-rate research university. We need a definition and some metrics. I believe it has to do with the number of faculty engaged in significant research activity. It also involves the number of research awards the University handles, the visibility in the community and relative ranking of each department, etc.

When we talk about first-rate or top-tier, we use it as a qualitative term. We look for significant discoveries, world-class faculty and graduate students, presentations at key national and international conferences and faculty elected to the various academies. There are dozens of different metrics. I don’t know exactly how we rank in categories like research dollars, citations or square feet of lab space per faculty member because I’ve never been concerned about it until now.

Brown has some faculty who are internationally recognized as dominant leaders in their fields.

It does, but we have a smaller number of such faculty for our size than we should have. That’s why the research enterprise and Graduate School also go together. You can’t attract top faculty if you don’t have top graduate students and you don’t get top graduate students unless you have top faculty. To get top faculty you must also offer competitive start-up packages, good research facilities and research support of various kinds. We hope to create virtuous cycles, where strength attracts strength.

This will have a time horizon of, what, a decade or so?

You can’t say, “OK, we’re going to be a top research university overnight.” What it takes – and this was my litmus test for both [President] Ruth [Simmons] and Bob – is a willingness to stay the course and treat this as a long-term investment, where ROI, to use the classic business term, isn’t going to come in two, three, five years. We’ll have some successes, but you don’t move from second tier to first tier overnight – particularly when our competitors are also making huge investments in things like life sciences. Huge investments, orders of magnitude more than we can invest at this moment. The president and provost both reassured me that they know absolutely this is a long-term proposition. They’re in it for the long haul.

And that’s what persuaded you to take the job?

Well, yes, that was the siren song. The way I read it, they are talking about nothing less than transforming Brown. With 100 additional appointments and maybe 150 replacements for retirements over the next seven to ten years, we’ll see new people in half of our faculty positions. If we place our bets wisely, then indeed we can transform this place within a decade. That was the tipping point for me – the realization that Ruth and Bob were really serious about this, that they were committed to getting the resources and staying the course. It’s one thing to help your own department build up to a level of national prominence – I was lucky to be a part of that – but it’s quite a different matter to help do that at the University scale. There’s much more impact that way, and I live for impact.

Brown has had national impact before. I’m thinking of the early days of distributed computing and the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS).

We took huge risks. I was able to convince [President] Howard [Swearer] that we should do this ridiculous thing of trying to compete with CMU and MIT for the big bucks required to bring the “scholar’s workstation” to campus. He basically let Bill Shipp, Norm Meyrowitz and me entrepreneur that and we actually made it happen. We went head-to-head with technical universities ten times our size and footprint, and we were one among three pioneering institutions by taking the risk. We also had the first broadband campus computer network in the country. We took risks, but I’d have to say that nearly every time we did that it paid off in some dimension.

But the University also missed a chance when it closed down IRIS after external support stopped coming.

Huge. We’re now in catch-up mode. I’m perfectly willing to go on record and say that we lost the leadership particularly in the leading edge use of computers in the humanities. There is still a core group for humanities computing in the Scholarly Technology Group. In the sciences, we’re recapturing leadership. My colleagues and I are dedicated to furthering the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization (TCASCV), to create a first-rate scientific computing and visualization facility that includes the virtual reality “Cave.” So yes, we had the lead, we lost the lead, but with new management and new resources being brought to bear, we should be able to leverage Brown’s strengths and do a selective set of leapfrogs.

And that’s the third part of your new position?

Yes. Running the Office of Research Administration (ORA) is necessary but not sufficient. Running a good Brown University Research Foundation (BURF) or BURF-like IP/tech transfer office is necessary but not sufficient. The real excitement comes in identifying new opportunities inside the University – among departments, between individuals, a la the Brain Science Program – and then matching those internal partnerships with suitable outside collaborators, including funding sources or other universities. Research in the future will be all about collaboration and distributed research groups that are facilitated through technology.

How will you start?

I want to establish some kind of faculty incentive and reward fund.

We all know about cost-sharing; certain grants require institutional cost-sharing. But that’s just a cost of doing business. What I want goes well beyond that. I want to help faculty get proactive about turning up new opportunities and getting them funded. I want to have resources so that a faculty member can come to me with a proposal and say, “I could work with so-and-so in another department this summer. If we had another graduate student, we could write a proposal and submit it in the fall. We will need a summer student salary and some travel money.” Anything that helps someone bootstrap. This seed money should be focused especially on multi-investigator initiatives and efforts to create larger-scale multidisciplinary programs. Getting proposals written and funded is hugely time-consuming; we can grease the skids. So that’s part one, the incentive part.

Then there is the reward part. I want to figure out how to give some unrestricted research funds to people who are extraordinarily productive, who are entrepreneurial.

I also believe we can be far more aggressive in growing our IP portfolio and enabling technology transfer. That will mean spending money on additional people to help faculty and students do tech transfers, but it could help the University, help faculty and students, and most of all help benefit society. That social dimension is obvious in biomed, but new materials, new algorithms – these also have the potential to improve the way our society operates.

Are your colleagues surprised that you took this job?

Yes, most people are very surprised because they know how uninterested I was in an administrative job and they know I’ve turned down administrative jobs elsewhere. I think part of what got me interested in doing this job is that I was encouraged to maintain the thing I love best, which is the teaching, especially of undergraduates. I still teach large introductory courses. I’ve taught them continuously since 1965. Even when I was on sabbaticals, I taught an introductory course. I still love teaching, but I also look forward greatly to helping transform the University. In the words of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We face an insurmountable opportunity.”