Research at Brown shows "signs of steady progress"

One of Brown's big research successes this year was the University's collaboration with URI and other institutions to secure Rhode Island's participation in the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), a grant-making program of the National Science Foundation. The George Street Journal visited with Andries van Dam, vice president for research, to talk about that development and others.

Today is the second anniversary of your tenure as vice president for research. What have those years brought?

There are noticeable signposts of steady progress, although progress has been way slower than an impatient person like me would like to have seen by now. We have a fully functional office and beautiful new quarters in Horace Mann that meet our needs. Faculty come to us for help in ever-increasing numbers. We've distributed some new sources of money to support research and have started seeing some results from such seed funds.

But the big change is that we have a much larger footprint in the state than when I started. Becoming part of NSF's EPSCoR program is by far the most important, for three reasons. First, URI and Brown got a $200,000 planning grant. That allowed us to set up a planning infrastructure led by URI and Brown. Second, by becoming an EPSCoR state, our researchers now have access to an additional pot of NSF money available for meritorious, peer-reviewed proposals. Third, the planning process led to an unprecedented collaboration among all the institutions of higher learning in the state, and between them and the state's Economic Development organizations. This summer we submitted a large EPSCoR (RI)2: Research Innovation for Rhode Island proposal in marine life sciences which, if awarded, will have a major impact on life science research infrastructure in the state.

Now our researchers can also participate in a version of this for the Department of Defense, called DEPSCoR. Same kind of thing - a special set-aside pool of DoD money for highly meritorious, peer-reviewed science. The NIH has such a program too.

Congress's whole intent was to give the little guys a chance to catch up, states that had been receiving less than 1 percent of an agency's annual research funding - but the awards are based on merit.

One of your original goals was to offer seed money to faculty who were developing research proposals.

The seed funds for new and large-scale multidisciplinary efforts are the most adventurous, the most high-risk/high-potential-payoff funds in our portfolio. So far, we have had 10 start-up projects we've seeded and we are making rounds of all of them this fall. Two have been very successful already. One helped secure a $5-million grant to support the V.A. Medical Center's collaboration with Brown on limb loss, and another helped secure a grant to EpiVax for development of a tularemia vaccine in which Brown will be significantly involved.

What we want to see out of those seed-fund grants are multidisciplinary center-style proposals for external funding. The process of priming the pump to help researchers write more proposals is working. A little lubrication goes a long way.

Where do you see that paying off?

I think there is much more team building, particularly across departmental and divisional lines. We see many more teams from the physical sciences and bio-med. The pace of multidisciplinary group forming is heating up. That's responsive to national funding agendas and is absolutely what we want to have happen.

A critically important vacancy is our assistant vice president for research initiatives. We are looking for candidates with a research background who would like to help other faculty with team building, idea generation, proposal development. We're all doing that work; we just can't do it at the pace I'd like to see. Having an AVP would make an order-of-magnitude difference.

It's hard not to notice the degree to which the life sciences are part of these interdisciplinary teams.

There's a major trend toward collaboration between the life sciences and the physical sciences. There is so much intellectual foment and excitement there and, not coincidentally, that's where significant research funding exists. One example that I think will be hugely successful is the biosafety aspects of nanomaterials. Investigators in bio-med are teaming with those from engineering. They want to know what carbon nanotubes might do to cells. Nanostructures could be a huge benefit in the body but we know far too little about potential health risks.

Aren't the life sciences converting too? Some research programs already seem halfway to computer science or engineering or applied math.

Exactly. Systems biology, structural biology ... all these have moved away from observation and experimentation to computer modeling, deep understanding of chemistry and physics and material properties at all scales. So yes, the life sciences are working closely with the physical scientists and collaborating on extraordinary new tools, especially modeling and imaging techniques.

What else?

The revised patent policy we've been working on for nine months is ready for a third level of broad consultation. After wide review by the faculty and administration, I hope it will go to the Corporation this academic year. We wanted a policy that a) was more in line with what our research peers were doing, and b) made an explicit allocation not only to the inventor but also to the inventor's lab. The percentages are changing; there will be more income for the inventor and the inventor's lab.

How about conditions on the outside?

I'm very concerned about funding trends in this country. The trend lines are down. The rate of increase at NIH has slowed hugely albeit after multiple years of significant increases. NSF has been asked to prepare a budget cut of 3 percent. Homeland Security has a lot of money, but it's for deployment, not long-term basic science. Department of Energy and NASA programs could come under siege. We are the seventh-largest university for NASA funding, so a cut there could really hurt us. I think this may come to a head in the early winter, past the election when there are likely to be revised estimates about the size of the budget deficit. We may have serious budget cuts proposed, and then we'll have to see how many of our elected officials will stand up for protecting research funding, which I believe is vital to our country's continued safety and prosperity. Even the life science people are finding it difficult to get new grants and there have been published reports about life scientists dropping out of academe because of the amount of effort required to keep research and labs funded.

And going forward?

Our mission at Brown is to make sure that the quality and quantity of our research proposals are such that we will be among the winners in the game. Many of our centers are going up against competitors that can field much bigger teams. Our office exists to help our faculty compete. We want to get more than our fair share.