Task Force on Convergent Research and Education

Research enterprises at leading research universities face unprecedented challenges. Federal funding cutbacks, increased government restrictions on fundable research areas, predicted reductions in international PhD students, and institutional budget constraints require us to develop a more resilient research strategy. As a research university, we must position our faculty for success and impact. Though all universities invest in their research enterprises, the emerging threats demand that we identify innovative and strategic approaches to sustain faculty impact, including their capacity to compete for external funding from a more diverse set of sources when necessary (e.g., large government center grants, foundations, international funding, and philanthropy). Now more than ever, when new approaches and sources of support are clearly needed, this report presents one strategy that could create not only a more resilient research enterprise but also a more ambitious one. The proposed investment programs support faculty hiring, PhD funding, and early-stage research in unique and strategic ways. 

The eight University-wide themes emerged from a comprehensive, bottom-up information-gathering process that included crowd-sourced input from all research faculty across the entire university as well as feedback from program leaders, center directors, and deans. As detailed in our report, synthesizing these responses revealed themes where impactful research is being conducted by faculty across multiple schools and colleges throughout the institution. We also identified exciting “convergent” work occurring primarily within individual schools or colleges. We encourage deans to develop strategies for advancing these intra-school/college opportunities as well. 

Several deans are already developing strategies to advance these themes. Examples include conducting faculty searches focused on intra-school/college themes using approaches similar to those outlined in this report for university-wide themes. Deans should also convene faculty leadership within their schools/colleges, along with directors of intra-school/college research centers, to develop additional initiatives such as school/college-level PhD fellowships aligned with these themes. Most importantly, we recommend a transparent and inclusive process to build broad support within each school/college—from identifying themes to implementing strategic investments. 

This question falls outside the task force’s charge. We were asked to identify themes, barriers to convergence, and investment programs that could promote successful convergence while addressing these barriers. The University president and provost will determine the rollout strategy for these programs, with the understanding that we must proceed deliberately—piloting programs first to develop optimal implementation approaches. However, the report recommends that no theme should remain dormant in any given year. Thus, when only some themes are selected for seed-funding or cluster hiring solicitations each year, all other themes should be invited to participate in planning grant competitions. 

The proposed “planning grant” programs are specifically designed to facilitate and encourage self-assembly around both existing sub-themes and emerging new themes. We are particularly excited about this type of support proposed to ensure and encourage “bottom-up” faculty organized convergent research initiatives. This is critical because the eight overall themes and their sub-themes will necessarily evolve over time. These themes and any new themes yet to evolve should be periodically revisited and reassessed to reflect BU’s current strengths and emerging opportunities. 

We are partnering with External Affairs to design a comprehensive communications and marketing plan targeting key internal and external audiences. The plan will roll out over the coming months following the report’s release and will reach other research institutions (including their leadership and potential faculty recruits), corporate leaders, city/state/national policymakers, funding agencies (government and foundations), and philanthropists. 

The task force strongly believes in continuing the university’s long-standing record of outstanding basic science and discovery-focused research, and we emphasize that continuing the pioneering research programs led by individualfaculty is essential. Our report should not be misinterpreted as implying that all research at the university should be conducted by convergent approaches. Individual faculty are in no way obligated to participate in convergent research initiatives if these approaches do not advance the goals or success of their research. The report explicitly states this in several places. The University requires a robust balance of individual faculty pursuing deep expertise that advances critical knowledge and foundational understanding, alongside team-science communities that can draw upon these basic researchers when needed. In fact, convergent research teams will likely failwithout a complementary community of faculty advancing basic research. To reiterate a key point from the report: convergence is one strategy—but not the only strategy—for BU to sustain high-impact, leading research. 

The themes and subthemes presented in this report represent the result of crowd-sourced input from all faculty and 1 year of task force meetings with a variety of constituencies. This input was synthesized to reveal themes where impactful research is being conducted broadly by faculty across multiple schools and colleges throughout the institution and in which BU already has a strong record of impactful scholarship and external funding. As mentioned in the answer to a previous question, the task force identified many strong, exciting, and important research areas that engage with faculty primarily within a single school/college or even a single department but did not rise to be thought of as a current university-wide theme. 

The University is working hard to raise funds from philanthropy to support convergence and to identify internal sources of funds that were never targeted or used for operational costs (examples might be an unexpected and episodic windfall from university inventions; or from existing seed programs in the technology transfer office, such as the ignition award program). We will also look to partner with research centers that have existing seed grants.