A blue-ribbon committee formed by Chancellor Linda Katehi has recommended changes to the UC Davis research enterprise to support a new culture of creativity, inquisitiveness, entrepreneurship, collaboration and risk taking.

The committee’s draft report is the first step “in effecting change in our research endeavors,” Katehi said this week in opening up the draft for comment. The comment period runs through June 11; see details below.

Katehi had asked the committee to identify key success factors that must be in place and barriers that must be removed to meet her stated objective: “substantially growing research at the university over the next five years.”

The committee formulated 11 recommendations to help the university achieve its “fullest research potential” and addressed possible impediments, including the committee’s “significant concern that the current research infrastructure is overly bureaucratic and risk adverse.”

The committee produced “an excellent draft report that outlines a plan of action,” Katehi said in a May 25 letter to the Council of Deans and Vice Chancellors. “The committee and I now seek assistance from the larger UC Davis community and ask you (and your units) to review the draft report and provide us with your input and suggestions.”

She thanked people in advance for their “engaged participation in helping UC Davis launch to bold new heights” — to a ranking as one of the top five public research universities nationwide, as she has declared often.

“In an increasingly competitive research funding environment, compounded by falling state support for higher education in general, every institution must be proactive in refining and optimizing its research enterprise,” Katehi wrote in her May 25 letter.

She established the Blue-Ribbon Committee on Research in December. The 19-member panel comprises professors, administrators, a research associate and a graduate student from the Davis and Sacramento campuses; Claire Pomeroy, vice chancellor of Human Health Sciences and dean of the School of Medicine, serves as chair.

“I am excited that the university is committed to both continuing our tradition of research excellence and embracing a proactive strategy to move it to the next level of impact and success,” Pomeroy said. “This report’s recommendations — the work of a collaborative, multidisciplinary group of researchers across campus — provide a roadmap for matching our collective and individual strengths with the needs of society in a way that will further advance UC Davis’ position as a preeminent research university.”

The committee, in the draft report’s executive summary, called for “a research culture and administration support structure that streamlines campus administrative processes, changes its goal to be mitigation of compliance risk rather than seeking to eliminate risk, and views its mission to be enabling faculty and research teams to thrive in their research endeavors.”

Sponsored program expenditures at UC Davis grew from $320 million in 2001-02 to $622 million in 2008-09. But while the eight-year gain was cause for celebration, the committee emphasized that “further growth should be guided by a vision to match our strengths and expertise with societal need.”

The committee recognized that the university’s rapidly growing research enterprise “was not planned strategically,” according to the executive summary. Further, the committee cited its concern “that we have become overly compliance driven.”

The committee cited these factors:

• Volume and rapidity of research growth, boosting the workload of administrative staff.

• Budget reductions, further hampering the delivery of timely support and service.

• Federal regulations and increased expectations for fiscal and regulatory accountability, accentuating the need for a service-oriented administrative infrastructure.

The committee declared: “We need to establish a ‘best practice’ research administration infrastructure focused on encouraging faculty input into the research administration process and committed to the goal of ensuring that faculty become even more successful in achieving grant support and performing excellent research.”

According to the executive summary, committee members “heard from others that ‘UC Davis is less than the sum of its parts.’”

The committee members responded by noting that they had been accorded a “big picture” view into research at UC Davis, and they saw “clear potential” for UC Davis to be greater than the sum of its parts.

“We feel strongly that the recommendation and actions outlined in this report will help guide UC Davis to its fullest research potential and realize its stated goals.”

Here are the 11 recommendations (see the full report for the proposed actions that go with each recommendation):

• Create a culture of research excellence

• Align UC Davis expertise with societal needs-opportunities

• Incentivize research and researcher excellence

• Build on existing strengths in interdisciplinary collaboration

• Optimize function of centers and organized research units

• Encourage “large” grants, including infrastructure, core, center and training grants

• Facilitate knowledge transfer

• Expand resources for research and researcher support

• Remove administrative barriers and increase transparency

• Standardize reporting of UC Davis research metrics

• Enhance visibility of UC Davis research, including high-impact public relations campaign

READ THE REPORT, SUBMIT COMMENTS

The draft report is available online, in SmartSite — smartsite.ucdavis.edu — and this is also where you are invited to enter your comments through June 11.

• You will need a UC Davis login ID and password (Kerberos) to enter SmartSite, and, once there, if you have not already done so, you must “join” the “Chancellor’s Blue Ribbon Research” worksite.

• To join the worksite, start by clicking on “Membership” under My Workspace near the upper left-hand corner of the page.

• Click on “Joinable Sites” (in blue, under the Membership gold bar).

• Search for “Chancellor’s Blue Ribbon Research.”

• Look for the “Chancellor’s Blue Ribbon Research” under the gray Worksite bar, and click on “Join” (in blue). After doing this, you will see a “Chancellor’s Blue Ribbon Research” tab on the gold bar at the top of the page.

• Click on the “Chancellor’s Blue Ribbon Research” tab.

• In the index on the left-hand side of the page, you can click “Full report” (for a PDF) or “Forums” (with 12 sections, one for each of the draft report’s 11 recommendations and one for the implementation section).

In an introductory message, the committee states: “It would be most helpful if you would associate your comments with the appropriate thread-section of the report.”

Blue-Ribbon Committee on Research: Responsibilities and membership