Road Map Strategic Priority 1 ’deep dive’

Strategic Priority 1 (Engage in path-breaking graduate education, research, scholarship and creative activities that shape the world) presented its deep dive update to the Road Map Steering Committee at its Sept. 22 meeting.

SP1 co-chair Howard Brown provided a quick overview, noting that the team was most interested in explaining how it had developed its metrics.

“Goal A, B and C remain unchanged and we’ve reworded D a little,” Brown said. “The metric for A and B also remains unchanged from last year and C is under development.”

Brown said that Goal D requires more exploration because it was not only reworded but also broadened. “We’ve tried to round it out to all aspects of campus, research, scholarship and creative activities,” he said.

Goals matter because we’re always interested in rankings and reputation, he added, noting that the University has been an R1 institution for about five years and is now one of 146 institutions, so “the club is getting a little bigger.”

U.S. News & World Report rankings remain about the same as last year, Brown said. “But I looked at the quartiles, not specific rankings, and we have three graduate programs in the top quartile, and eight in the second quartile,” he said. “They don’t actually do all disciplines and now we’re waiting for the NRC (National Research Council) rankings, which were last done 12 years ago. They’re the most reliable, but also way out of date.”

Positive rankings and a strong reputation enable us to attract quality faculty, students and donors, Brown reminded the group.

Goal A: Binghamton University is nationally recognized for outstanding doctoral education.

The SP1 team broke Goal A into two parts, using date from the National Science Foundation Survey of Earned Doctorates. “The data is not from our Graduate School or from SUNY, which don’t match up.

“We were looking to achieve a target of top 80 earned doctorates by 2020 and we did,” Brown said. “Are we looking to improve on that? Maybe, but we need to take a closer look.”

Brown said that one thing the University is doing well is creating new graduate programs. He noted that 14 new programs were at some point in the pipeline. The State Education Department has approved several new programs that are already in place, SUNY has four proposals under review and four other combined or dual-degree programs are going through the campus process. “It could take a year or more, but we’re looking at fairly sure bets that they will be approved,” Brown said. “These reflect an expansion of nursing and pharmacy in Johnson City.”

Goal B: Binghamton University has a research, scholarship and creative activities profile of a premier public university.

The team used data from the National Science Foundation HERD (Higher Education Research and Development) Survey from 2020 and selected institutions that don’t have medical schools and are public to compare R&D expenditures with. The R&D expenditures reflect the University’s improvement over time and show that Binghamton rose five spots to 43 in the 2020 survey, meeting the goal’s original target. The target now is to reach the top 40 by 2025.

Team co-chair Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research, addressed the University’s research expenditure portfolio in terms of sources of funding. “Most of the University’s dollars are federal, either direct or flow through (63%), which are the most difficult and prestigious to get,” he said. “The remaining dollars come from New York state and from industry, private foundations and others.”

In terms of what is funded, Sammakia said healthcare, electronics packaging/systems science and education/training/outreach are the top three categories, with energy/materials science next.

“You can really see that that’s why we keep focusing on healthcare, energy, economics and systems science and investing in them,” he said.

Goal C: Binghamton University has a collaborative culture for research, scholarship and creative production.

Brown said that SP1 is also working to track the University’s collaborative culture. “This is really specific to Binghamton so there’s no easy way to compare ourselves with others, but we know we have a collaborative culture,” he said.

Former team member Curtis Kendrick, who recently returned to the faculty after serving as dean of the Libraries, helped to design a faculty survey that has yet to be administered, but will be used to create baseline data about collaborations, Brown said. “We’re using Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence seed grant recipients (204 faculty total) who received TAE collaborative seed grants,” Brown said. “Not all of them will respond, but we’ll reach about 189 of those faculty who remain faculty here to see what kind of response rate we can get to this quick and easy survey.”

Once the survey is completed, the team will try to set a metric for improving the culture of collaboration over time, Brown said.

There was quite a bit of discussion about the 10-question survey instrument and the limited target audience for administering it. Questions include: How would the respondent rate the success of this collaboration? What was the level of commitment? What was your sense of roles and responsibilities? Would you have been successful without the seed grant support and collaborators? How valuable was Binghamton’s support for your collaboration? How satisfied were you with it?

Mary Beth Curtin, associate vice president for research, noted that, over the years, the Division of Research has sometimes looked at outcomes of seed grants and could look at that again. The data has not been lost from past reviews. She added that TAE outcome surveys also ran separately from awarded programs, but faculty have to be the ones to report the results of the collaborations, so they can run them side by side and then ask which are results of TAE seed grants.

Others asked about expanding the survey to ask about grant applications or other initiatives, but it was explained that the sole focus for the survey is collaborations in research and scholarship and it will be kept short.

“We’re looking at what is unique to Binghamton and trying to establish what the data looks like and then maybe go from there,” Sammakia said. “What we’re trying to get out of it is who benefits from the collaboration?”

“We’re talking about a survey that can be loosely described as a focus group to see if it is a baseline for data collection,” Brown said. “We hope to learn how better to foster collaboration. We already have hubs of collaboration (TAEs, centers, institutes) and they all bring together plenty of faculty in collaborations in one form or another.”

Goal D: The research, scholarship and creative activities at Binghamton University significantly enhance and enrich society.

The current metric looks at royalties, equity in companies, grants to companies and the like. “Our target was to maintain an average of $10 million in company commercialization impact but we increased it to $20 million because we are doing better and think it will continue to rise,” Sammakia said.

Brown added that the rise in activity is a mix of initiatives. “We can’t say that any one thing made a difference. It’s a broad mix.”

The new metric for Goal D is to measure creative activities of national and international prominence (CANIP), Natalia Mijatovic, professor art and design.

“We decided to find a unifying common denominator,” she said. “Is there a specific area we can use? We brought dozens of people together to come up with this one metric: to add a new category in faculty annual reports where people will be able to log in actual events based on categories.

“How to determine which accomplishments meet this goal will be left up to individual departments,” she added. “Specific guidelines are available in each discipline and are used for our promotion and tenure process. For example, the Glimmerglass Festival is really of national prominence even though it is regional for us. This prominence of venue will be one category under which we can plug in and compare output from year to year.”

This process will allow faculty to track the success of their creative research, Mijatovic said. “We don’t necessarily expect numbers to rise by a certain percentage or number, but we expect to be able to track creative activities this way.”

It’s hoped this process will be available to inclusion in faculty reports next year, Brown said. “We’re deciding whether to get an outside vendor or design our own and that requires significant input from faculty.”

There may be other fields on campus we’re missing, President Harvey Stenger said. Perhaps creative writing, though measuring publications there might be more parallel. Also, some work in the arts is solidly in publishing.

Scholarship activities in the humanities and social sciences was also discussed, with Brown noting that the Binghamton by the Book online includes a faculty tab that will show information on all faculty publications.

“It’s a little broad, but it’s the basis for thinking how to do this,” he said. “To have people identify publications whatever discipline they’re in. We’re going to try to have the ability to pull out exclusively human and social sciences publications. We want to have a sense of an overall trend line. We want to see general trends across humanities and social sciences publications that are notoriously difficult to track by impact. We can’t do this with a metric based on impact as a broad category.”

There was additional discussion about clinical faculty, who aren’t required to complete the faculty annual report, so the University is not gathering all of the data it needs, though pharmacy school rankings include pharmacy practice publications as their second-highest priority. Stenger said he would take the clinical faculty issue back to the provost to discuss.

Road Map funded initiatives

Brown explained that of the two hires SP1 was given through Road Map funding, the Communications and Marketing hire of a videographer joined the University in November 2021. “We can’t find a picture of him because he’s always behind the camera,” Brown said. “He has been very active and you can check out a number of videos he has done. The Faculty Focus series is quite sophisticated and was featured in the highlight reel of the University Research Magazine Association’s 2022 Film Festival; there are 11 faculty academic minute recordings; two videos highlighting R&D at Binghamton (Ron Miles and NENY) and he has assisted with other media productions in the division.”

The second position for a faculty awards and digital presence coordinator is being restarted and has been posted.

Highlights of recent campus research and scholarship activities

“We are all really excited about being awarded more than $113 million to establish a hub for battery technology innovation in upstate New York,” Sammakia said. “Another great achievement is the National Science Foundation CyberCorps Scholarships for Service grant awarded to Ping Yang, associate professor of computer science, that will train students to join the workforce as cybersecurity experts.”

The University also had a great year with four NSF CAREER awards (Hao Liu, chemistry; Seunghee Sin, computer science; Kaiyan Yu, mechanical engineering; Pu Zhang, mechanical engineering) this year and these faculty are all working in exciting areas. “These are really difficult awards to win,” Sammakia said.

SP1 also highlighted three faculty who won National Institutes of Health Awards that went to Bing Si in system science and industrial engineering, Chris Bishop in psychology and Nathan Tumey in pharmaceutical sciences; the Urban Archaeology Corps initiative headed by Laurie Miroff from the Public Archaeology Facility; 2021-22 Fulbright awarded Hans Gindlesberger in art and design, Michael Kelly in comparative literature, Thomas Wilson in anthropology, Thomas Glave in English, and noted there were others not yet awarded.

“Fulbrights are not easy to get and give us a great international profile,” Brown said. “Departments that aren’t in U.S. News graduate rankings show up here. We are sending our faculty abroad, interacting with the larger world, which fits perfectly with our mission.”

Mijatovic also spoke about select achievements in the arts, highlighting Laura Hawkes in theatre, David Bisaha in theatre and Tomonari Nishikawa in cinema. “These faculty greatly contribute to the University and demonstrate our collaborative spirit,” she said, “and they all will be better noted once we actually have the arts category in our faculty annual reports.”

New School of the Arts

The Faculty Senate is reviewing the proposal for establishing a new School of the Arts within Harpur College of Arts and Sciences. “Apart from being a very necessary and important umbrella to educate and foster the role of departments, this would contribute to our standing as a great University,” Mijatovic said. “It will have an enormous impact culturally and economically in the region. It’s at the proposal stage of refinement and alongside it will come extensive renovation of the Fine Arts Building.”

“This process that Celia (Klin, dean of Harpur College) has been shepherding isn’t one of those smooth takeoffs, but I think it will create an opportunity for donors,” said Stenger. “There will be some bumps along the way. There will be a 10-year renovation project. It’s that big and it will probably take $100-120 million over 10 years and we haven’t even identified the money.

“We’ll take it to the SUNY Construction Fund, which will break it up into phases, but if we knock down half of a building, where do we put people?” he asked. “It will be disruptive, but the alternative is to do nothing and we’re not going to do nothing.”

All of the affected departments have created a comprehensive departmental plan to contribute to general master plan, Mijatovic said.

Cluster hire initiative

Mike Jacobson, director of the Office of Strategic Research Initiatives, has been working with several groups to develop possible areas for cluster hiring.

The University organized these groups of faculty, who were picked by deans, before any word of additional money from SUNY would be allotted to campuses for faculty hires, Stenger said. “SUNY over the summer allotted $53 million to universities to hire new faculty with the singular goal of increasing research funding,” he said. “Binghamton will hire 35 faculty due to this funding, and they are additional to those we would already be hiring.”

“One team we worked with was materials sciences and they recommended developing a Center for Sustainable Manufacturing to mitigate the harms of electronic waste and single-use materials,” Jacobson said. “This center would help discover new materials and designs including looking at biologically inspired designs for things like new uses for fungi, and how we can integrate artificial intelligence into these things.”

A second team is proposing an Institute for Healthy Living and Aging, Jacobson said.

“This institute would address our rapidly aging population and needs,” he said. “The institute would be a cross-disciplinary collaboration looking at holistic aging and aging in place, next-gen biomanufacturing, organ development and addressing treatment-resistant diseases and bioelectronic medicine and telemedicine. How can we use technology through sensors and telemedicine so people can stay in their homes and live healthy lifestyles?”

The University will also look at the School of Arts for a cluster hire.

Proposals for the center and institute have also been presented to the provost for consideration of overall faculty hiring, Jacobson said.

Research space on campus

As faculty are hired, research space across campus becomes a high priority and the University has set a goal to create a consistent, usable tool to have space conversations with faculty, said Curtin. “We did bring in a consultant and they’re putting together recommendations and best practices we can tailor for Binghamton, with a draft report expected soon that will be rolled out to the deans.”

For the SUNY faculty hiring initiative, 45 proposals were received by the president and provost, who scored them independently and will approve 35 or them to move forward, Stenger said. “Now we have to figure out where put them all. We will hire 30 replacement faculty next year plus 35 new faculty in a campus that is almost out of space, and that’s why we have this space allocation initiative.”

This hiring initiative could mean 170 faculty over the next five years, which means a building or two, Stenger said. “We’re looking at a proposal for the governor and looking at where we will put the building(s),” he said.

Metrics for space allocation will be developed based on faculty, staff and student lines and variations for types of lab space, discipline and external funding, Curtin said. Annual reports to deans showing total research space by department and PI will be used to reallocate space between schools and departments.