S6E7: What does being an R1 university mean for UMaine?

In February, the University of Maine received an R1 designation from the prestigious Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. This rank serves as the highest possible tier a doctoral research university can achieve in the Carnegie Classification, and it places UMaine among the top 4% of research universities nationwide.

In this episode of “The Maine Question” podcast, UMaine President Joan Ferrini-Mundy discusses what the R1 designation means for the university and the state, what it could offer students — Maine’s future workforce — faculty, staff, and community partners and stakeholders. She also discusses the role of Maine’s only public research university in the 21st century.

This episode is the first in a two-part series featuring President Ferrini-Mundy. Next week, she will speak about life as a university president.

Transcript

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Joan Ferrini‑Mundy:  I am looking for us to be more internationally known in more fields. We have a number of areas where we have superstar researchers and groups that are well‑known and visible. One thing that we’ll see in 10 years is UMaine will be on the map around the world in a variety of areas because the work is so good.

Ron Lisnet:  University of Maine president, Joan Ferrini‑Mundy, on her vision of what the research enterprise could become in the future at UMaine. Research or R&D has been a focus of the state’s land, sea, and space‑grant university since its very beginnings.

More than 150 years later, it’s taking another major leap forward. I’m Ron Lisnet. This is “The Maine Question” podcast.

The news came early in 2022 that UMaine had achieved a major milestone related to research when it was named an R1 top‑tier research university by the prestigious Carnegie Classification of institutions of higher learning, a standard that only 146 institutions has reached.

That’s less than four percent of degree‑granting higher ed institutions. That milepost is the culmination of some 25 years of work to promote basic research, R&D, technology transfer, spin‑off companies, and more across Maine. The latest numbers show that work is paying off.

UMaine brought in more than $133 million in research funding. In total close to 180 million in expenditures in 2021. Both are all‑time highs. In addition, the number of graduate students and doctoral students, in particular, are also at an all‑time high.

In several key areas, UMaine has or is developing an international reputation for the R&D work it’s doing. Renewable energy, climate change, next‑generation forest products. Other disciplines are gaining in reputation. Some of that work goes beyond the hard sciences to the humanities and social sciences. It’s about a lot more than the next new widget.

Since her arrival some four years ago, achieving the R1 designation has been a major goal of President Ferrini‑Mundy. Her background made for an ideal set of experiences to shepherd UMaine into this unchartered territory.

With a PhD in math education, she has taught and held several administrative posts, which promoted research in STEM education. Just prior to coming to UMaine, she was chief operating officer at the National Science Foundation, one of the major entities that funds and promotes research in the US.

Austin, Texas, Silicon Valley, the Research Triangle in North Carolina, medical research in Boston. These are the major hubs of R&D in this country. The breakthroughs they’ve discovered, the products, the advances in medicine and computing, to say nothing of the jobs they create, are a major piece of the economy.

As UMaine’s research capacity grows, the possibility exists for Maine to become the offshore wind capital of the world possibly, or the wireless sensor or biofuels hub of the country and the world. We talked about all of this with President Ferrini‑Mundy in the first of a two‑episode podcast series here on The Maine Question.

Our question for this episode. What does R1 mean for Maine? President Ferrini‑Mundy, thank you so much for taking the time. I’ve had occasion over the years when we’ve done video projects to see what your calendar looks like.

You know how you have a white calendar and you got colored boxes, you have no white on your calendar. I’m glad you gave me a blue, a red, or a green box to talk to you today.

Joan:  Anytime, Ron. Happy to do it.

Ron:  R1, a big announcement that came here in the spring semester. As a practical matter for people who don’t work in higher education, how big a deal is this? What does this really mean?

Joan:  It’s a very big deal. As in any sector, there are various groups that ranker, categorize, or make awards or designations to different organizations. In higher education, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is one such organization that provides these rankings.

Every three years, they take a look at the nation’s universities and essentially categorize them according to a variety of criteria. For many years, UMaine has been R2, which is considered high research activity. This is a criterion that’s about what we do in research. What we do about inventing new knowledge for the world or new solutions to challenging problems that face the globe.

This year, based on our data, we were able to move up into the R1 category, which is very high research activity. It means that the great work that our faculty, students, and staff have been doing, the office of the vice president for research, and many, many other colleagues here has paid off.

We bring in an extraordinary number of and dollars in external grants. We have postdocs, we have staff who work in research, we have PhDs across the board. What it means is that we’re now recognized with these other first‑rate universities as a tier‑one, research one university.

Ron:  The differences in the levels between R2 and R1, does it open up more opportunities in different fields, or is it just a higher level overall of everything going on?

Joan:  It’s very hard to quantify. Being R1 is better than being R2, that’s for sure. We do have a lot of confidence that will open up some opportunities. There are certain grant‑making agencies that do pay a lot of attention to what your status is because it’s an indicator of your capacity to do great work in research.

We do expect that that will be noticed by funding agencies, by reviewers. We’re already hearing that it’s being noticed by candidates coming into our faculty. As we hire new folks into our various departments and colleges, they are interested in being in a first‑rate place.

Knowing this, we think it’ll give us a bit of a leg up in our recruitment. Also, in retaining people, and in attracting graduate students to the phenomenal work that goes on here at UMaine.

Ron:  Where is UMaine uniquely positioned? There are certain areas that we specialize in, composites, maybe renewable energy, now Nanocellulose is coming up. Are those some of the key ones? Are there others you would point to?

Joan:  Those are key. I’m in my fourth year here now. Every day, I learn about more depth and more strength at UMaine. Just yesterday, I had a great tour over in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of several labs that are working in one way or another with semiconductors and doing work with sensors that is funded by organizations like NSF, NASA, and many others.

We have strengths in a wide range of areas. Not all of those are STEM areas. We have strength in a variety of the humanities and social sciences as well. I point to the work that goes on in the archaeology area, where Professor Bonnie Newsom does tremendously interesting work with the Penobscot Nation and studies issues around the Maine coast and sea‑level rise.

We have work that goes on in the arts that is of national and international renown. Basically, UMaine has depth in several areas. The standouts, as you point out, our work in composites and the work of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center has been groundbreaking as well across the world. It’s very wonderful to be in a place that has such a breadth of research.

Ron:  As you look at those niche areas where we specialize, how do you go about leveraging those? Does extra focus go to those areas to up our game in those areas?

Joan:  One thing that’s interesting about the areas that we’ve already mentioned is that every one of them is interdisciplinary. I’ll take ECE because I was just there yesterday. It’s not as though the folks in that domain are only prepared as electrical or computer engineers.

They collaborate with chemists, physicists, mechanical engineers, social scientists, who need to help think about how people will engage with these new technologies. When we try to prioritize or invest more heavily in one of these areas, I always keep an eye on how interdisciplinary the area is.

Will it benefit more than a single department or a single very focused academic discipline? Will it reach broadly and make a difference beyond just a narrow picture of the field?

Ron:  You mentioned recruiting faculty and researchers. Does that bleed over into recruiting students? Does it make a difference, being R1, to recruit students?

Joan:  I sure hope it does. One advantage of being a student in a research university is that you get to participate in research as an undergraduate if things are arranged that way.

With our status and the continued attention that that will bring for us, we’re just stepping up as quickly as we can the breadth of opportunities that undergrads have to do research, and people may have heard of our Harold Alfond Foundation‑funded research learning experience project, which is now entering its second year.

Our goal is to make it possible for every first‑year student in their first semester who chooses to do so to be engaged in an authentic research and scholarly activity with a faculty member.

Being R1 helps us with that, Ron because we’re able to highlight the quality and excellence of that research and to try to support it with funding that will enable the engagement of students.

Ron:  How important are state‑of‑the‑art facilities, the bricks and mortar? Are there plans to enhance some of the facilities where this research happens?

Joan:  The facilities and then the instruments and equipment that are embedded in those facilities is absolutely vital to much of the research that we do here. What’s astounding and wonderful about UMaine at the same time is that our faculty have…They work in very old buildings by and large. Most of our buildings are more than 50 years old.

They have made makeshift approaches that are working for them. There are a lot of R1s that look rather different in terms of having new buildings and new facilities. We’re striving for that in a judicious and strategic way with terrific support from the state legislature and the federal delegation in helping us prioritize.

The biggest new addition, of course, is the Ferland Engineering Education and Design Center that will open up this fall. That’s a teaching facility where active researchers will be able to have teaching labs that will engage our students.

On the books, we have a number of other plans. The Alfond funding will allow for renovation in our very much older engineering buildings, as well as help to support GEM, the Green Engineering and Materials lab, the factory of the future that’s coming out of ASCC.

We’re looking to renovate. We also want to support our faculty as they try to make sure that they have the most modern instruments and the equipment that they need to do their work even within current facilities.

Ron:  The range of research goes from industries that are as old as Maine itself. You have forestry, fisheries, farming. Now there’s cutting‑edge new areas that UMaine is moving into artificial intelligence and the renewable energy that we talked about.

Can you talk about some of those new areas and how UMaine is going to move into and develop those areas?

Joan:  In a sense, Ron, you previewed the answer to the question. We are very strong in the so‑called heritage industries of Maine, in forestry, farming, and fisheries. We have some of the most impactful research around in those areas.

What’s interesting about it is that we are working in the present and looking toward the future in those areas, which means that artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, data science, and a range of other interdisciplinary emphases become very important in those industries now.

Our Center for Research on Sustainable Forests, it works on carbon budgeting for the entire state. Trying to look at how the forests actually are very important in offsetting carbon emissions. To do that requires new measurement techniques, new sensing techniques, and a variety of bioinformatics kinds of areas which are new that fold in then to our heritage industries.

Similarly, in Structures and Composites, which as you know, draw on Nanocellulose and a number of other materials that are wood‑based, in those fields, are now integrating artificial intelligence?

The 3D printing work engages artificial intelligence to study the quality and adjust in real‑time the printing process so that we’re able to make sure that the products are as strong and efficient as we can make them. A lot of it will come in AI in advanced kinds of manufacturing areas that we’re working in through the interdisciplinary applications of these areas.

We’re also growing very well in the biomedical and bioengineering areas, which have not been, over a long time, widely traditional for UMaine, but desperately needed across the country to see the great solutions that folks are doing. That puts engineers together with computer scientists, together with data visualization experts. For UMaine, it’ll come through the interdisciplinarity.

Ron:  What is MEIF? How does that program play out and interact with the research going on here?

Joan:  MEIF, the Maine Economic Improvement Fund, was started by the Maine legislature in 1997. It has a great history that would be good for you to cover in another podcast, actually.

It was a group of people called the faculty five, led by George Jacobson, a professor emeritus here with our Climate Change Institute, that made the case to the Maine legislature and to the Maine people that having a research and development capacity in their public university was important to the future of the state.

Maine is not a state that has a lot of industries here that do research and development within the state, as opposed to, say, Massachusetts, California, and others, where the R&D shops of major companies are based in some of those states. Maine doesn’t have that.

We still have industry that needs R&D. It needs proof of concept testing. It needs design of devices and materials. It needs support from scientists, engineers, and researchers.

The faculty five made the case to the legislature that a standing investment from the legislature to the university system could actually, in a sense, boost and catalyze the kind of capacity we would have in the state. That has just been extraordinarily beneficial over those decades to us in the University of Maine and across the system.

Those dollars go toward building up our research infrastructure, towards supporting researchers and students who are working in the seven sectors that were identified in 1997 as being important for the state of Maine, and who are working to basically solve the problems that the state faces that can be solved with R&D.

We work very heavily toward research capacity with those dollars. Toward supporting new technologies, licensing, and commercialization so that there’s a benefit back to the state. Trying to work to increase the economic development partnerships through arrangements with companies. Then the development of a workforce which is increasingly important today.

We’re very grateful to the state legislature for that investment and look toward the future very optimistically.

Ron:  The legislature, of course, is always looking for that acronym that we all love, ROI, return on investment. What can you say about the ROI of what they have done with MEIF?

Joan:  If you think of MEIF in a sense as a very generous seed funding to get us going, to get us started in key areas, to grow and boost some areas, then what we’re seeing now is more than a 5X ROI in terms of external grants that are coming to the state of Maine and other kinds of resources coming in based on that investment.

We invest in our faculty and students. They are able to do more interesting work, get more funding, bring that back to the state. That’s incredibly important for us.

Ron:  In higher education, we love our acronyms, don’t we? We need to have a glossary. ROI, MEIF, ASCC.

Joan:  All the TLAs. The three letter acronyms.

Ron:  Right.

[crosstalk]

Joan:  ASCC is not three letters. Anyway.

Ron:  [laughs] We’ll do some research on that one, too.

Joan:  [laughs]

Ron:  Traditionally, Maine has lagged behind many other states in terms of funding and focus on research. Do you see that situation changing? Does becoming R1 give Maine momentum to grow and move ahead in this entire enterprise?

Joan:  I hope so. We have to be strategic about how that happens. The faculty five worked with the legislature in 1996, ’97. We’re talking about how to bring to the present the argument, again, for why R&D is important for our state.

Why it will matter, particularly for the development of a talented workforce, to be the next generation of innovators and leaders in Maine. To do that development, one needs to have the R&D going on so that the students can work and learn in those environments.

I do think that it will help us move toward a stronger state investment in general if you add up what comes from every place. You add up what comes from state resources, from the private sector, and what the university itself invests.

We’d like to see the R&D investment as a percentage of the GDP in the state go up. That’s been a goal of a number of organizations for years in Maine, because it’s a signal of a healthy economy. We know there’s much more that we can do in Maine to get there.

Ron:  We’re talking about 25 years that this effort has been underway. In so many ways, it’s just getting started. What excites you most about the future? Where do you think we’ll be 10 years down the road, realistically, if this all goes the way you hope it does?

Joan:  We’ll just keep growing in the grants that we’re achieving, as well as the spending that we’re doing in research. I am looking for us to be more internationally known in more fields. We have a number of areas where we have superstar researchers and groups that are well‑known and visible.

One thing that we’ll see in 10 years is UMaine will be on the map around the world in a variety of areas because the work is so good. The second thing that I think is a distinction potentially for us, and we’re starting in on it with the RLE, is that students who come to the University of Maine.

I’m hoping, in 10 years, will be able to say I walked away from that institution ready to understand what it means to use research to improve quality of life for all of us, to improve the efficiency and productivity in the company, to create new inventions and new devices that can help save the world.

Our students will be those people because we are a place that will integrate our research mission with our teaching in new ways.

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Joan:  On the topics that matter to this generation and those coming along, to sustainability of the planet, to inclusion, to being able to be part of a better world. I want us to be that place. We’re on that path.

Ron:  Exciting times indeed. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us.

Joan:  It was great, Ron. Thank you very much.

Ron:  In next week’s episode, we shift gears a little bit as President Ferrini‑Mundy talks about what it’s like to be a university president in the 21st century. The most enjoyable parts of her job and challenges, too. You can find all of our episodes on Apple and Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, UMaine’s Facebook and YouTube pages, as well as Amazon and Audible.

Send along any questions or comments you have to mainequestion@maine.edu. I’m Ron Lisnet. We’ll catch you next time on The Maine Question.