Agenda made research a top priority

As Lipika Goyal described the summer she spent researching malaria and sickle-cell anemia in Ghana, her eyes grew wide and her face lit up. "It was like Candyland," said Goyal, a senior in the College and a University Scholar, who has spent the past two summers participating in biomedical research abroad. Goyal, who was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship in December, is one of many students who has benefited from the establishment of the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, which facilitated her application for the award. CURF opened just last semester, but the initiative to create such a center originated long before -- when University President Judith Rodin first drew up her Agenda for Excellence. The Agenda's first and second strategic goals lay out the design to improve the way research is conducted at Penn on all levels. While the creation of CURF gained a lot of attention within the undergraduate community, the Agenda included efforts to improve research among faculty, graduate students and post-doctoral students. Successes in the research aspect of the Agenda for Excellence have included streamlining the grant approval process for faculty researchers, the construction of new research space and a marked increase in externally funded research grants. But not all of the goals the Agenda set out to accomplish actually materialized. While in many cases focusing on research detracts from the prototypical undergraduate experience, University administrators said they made an effort to keep undergraduates in mind when looking at Penn research. "We are here as an outstanding world class educational institution, and we're here as an outstanding world class research institution," Provost Robert Barchi said. Outlined in strategic goal one, the Agenda pledged to establish an undergraduate research resource center and to seek external funding for undergraduate research. The creation of the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, which opened in September 2000, has addressed both of these goals. CURF's function is to match undergraduate students interested in engaging in research with funding and with faculty members who act as mentors. "We see ourself as a kind of clearinghouse of information for someone who has a pretty good idea of what they want to do but isn't sure who they want to do it with," CURF Director Arthur Casciato said. Despite the efforts to make undergraduate research part of Penn culture, some believe that encouraging only a few undergraduates to participate in research is not enough. "I think we need to have a more widespread central message -- everybody needs to get involved," Center for Nursing Research Director Barbara Medoff-Cooper said. One major source of pride for University research administrators has been the dramatic increase in sponsored research programs. While the Agenda aimed for an annualized growth rate of 2 percent in sponsored research, the actual growth rate over the past five years has far exceeded that estimate, reaching 11 percent. These figures indicate a vast increase in the number of external grants Penn researchers have received. "Penn has grown more quickly each year in the last six or seven years in overall research support than any other institution in the country," Rodin said. Of all Penn's schools, the School of Medicine experienced by far the largest boost in externally funded research grants. Consequently, the medical school's rating jumped from seventh to second in the nation. School of Medicine Vice Dean for Research Glen Gaulton attributed the growth to a greater interest in biomedical research by public donors and to an increase in the quality of the school's professors. "If you look at the total number of faculty, the number of tenure track faculty hasn't really changed over the years, but the number of grant dollars per year, it's basically almost double," Gaulton said. But Gaulton said that while the improvements in the medical school followed the general guidelines set by the Agenda for Excellence, the initiative to make such major improvements began with a document called the Molinoff Report in 1990. Another component of the Agenda's research goals pledged to increase the number and quality of research facilities, but accounts of how this was actually fulfilled varied from department to department. According to Vice Provost for Research Neal Nathanson, an overall effort to bring the most modern technology to research facilities did occur. The 1997 building of the Vagelos Laboratories, which contain some of Penn's most technologically advanced equipment, is part of this initiative, Nathanson said. But despite the University's efforts to create new research labs in up-and-coming fields, some faculty researchers say their labs and equipment are outdated and inadequate, and that the University should be taking greater steps to improve existing research facilities -- not just to build new ones. "Equipment that is basic and not funded by outside grants should be updated or replaced on a regular basis," Geology professor Hermann Pfefferkorn said. "Especially as that type of equipment is also used for student instruction." Nathanson agreed that the University's steps toward improving facilities may have left some departments behind. "If you did a walk-through of all the research buildings, you would find that some of them are absolutely terrific state-of-the-art, but there are research buildings that are clearly sub-par," Nathanson said. "I would say that one would find 30 percent of facilities excellent, 50 percent acceptable, and 20 percent would badly need renovation," he added. Nathanson pointed to the Medical School's Biomedical Library as a facility long overdue for renovation. "If you went down to the medical library, you would certainly not get the impression that we were number two of 125 medical schools," he said. And faculty researchers and University administrators have emphasized that Penn cannot continue to rise among research institutions if it does not anticipate up-and-coming research areas. "We are not going to get anywhere by resting on our laurels," Nathanson said. Nathanson said he envisions that genomics, information technology and nanotechnology -- the study of sub-atomic particles -- will be the focus of researchers' attention over the next decade. Since the debut of the Agenda for Excellence, the University has begun preparing for future research in these areas. In February, Rodin and Barchi announced the establishment of a new Genomics Institute and Cancer Genomics Program. And the nearly completed Levine Hall in the Computer Science Department will create new research space for information technology.