UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — On Oct. 14, Penn State Senior Vice President for Research Andrew Read hosted a conversation with the community on the University’s research enterprise. It was an opportunity for Penn State faculty, staff and students to learn more about current initiatives to strengthen the University’s research enterprise and engage with Read about the challenges and opportunities Penn State faces in today’s research landscape.

“We are one of the biggest research enterprises in the world,” Read said. “We are working on some of the most important problems for the 21st century, and we're doing it at very high levels.”

Read opened the hour-long conversation with an overview of the current state of Penn State’s research, acknowledging that it’s also been a period of change. He then fielded questions on topics ranging from the budget to the broader impacts of the University’s research and student success. Michael Wade Smith, senior vice president and chief of staff, moderated questions from the audience, some pre-submitted and some from members of the in-person and virtual audience.

Read announced that the University’s research expenditures for the last fiscal year, 2023-24, reached $1.337 billion, an 8% increase over last year. Importantly, Read noted, Penn State topped $1 billion in external grant and contract expenditures for the first time in the University’s history, a nearly 11% increase over the previous year.

“In a very challenging time, it really says something about our colleagues — staff, students and faculty — that we can perform at this level internally and nationally,” Read said.

Read has reinforced a goal set forth by President Neeli Bendapudi of ranking in the top 15 nationally for research expenditures. With its current expenditures, Penn State ranks 28th in the nation. However, Read noted that the University ranks 18th for federal funding, and he believes that Penn State is well positioned to move up, given its expertise in national priority areas such as semiconductors, energy, national security and plant science.

“The competition for funding among the top universities is not going away, and it is getting more intense each year,” Read said. “We’ve got great people and expertise at Penn State, and by investing wisely, we can overcome these challenges.

He said that it will take thoughtful and sustained investment in faculty hiring and retention, instrumentation and facilities, and program support.

Responding to a number of questions about the heavy workloads and process barriers faced by faculty and staff, Read noted that the University has committed $2 million to create 20 new research administration staff positions in college offices. In the last five years, the number of new federal regulations or changes to regulations has doubled, the volume of grants submitted and awarded has increased substantially, and the great resignation has taken its toll, Read explained. That has meant fewer staff handling a greater volume of more complex work, a situation which Read described as unsustainable. Read thanked the existing staff for their often-Herculean efforts, and said he hoped the additional positions will provide some relief. He committed to hiring additional staff as future workloads grow.

He also provided an update on the Research Support Transformation Project, which aims to further reduce unnecessary administrative burdens and increase the efficiency of operations so faculty and staff members can devote their full attention to pursuing groundbreaking discoveries, innovations and scholarship that address pressing societal issues.

With tools like myResearch Portal and myFunds Portal, faculty now have unprecedented visibility into research expenditures. Further improvements to these tools are coming, with financial data for clinical trials coming on stream later this month, and better visibility of the dashboards for staff supporting faculty. Going forward, the team will continue to gather input from faculty and staff to understand what’s working and how to build and refine new tools and dashboards. As they make updates, they will beta test those changes with smaller groups before rolling it out more broadly.

Acknowledging confusion around how research is supported in the new budget model, Read explained how research is protected and incentivized in a way it hasn’t been before. He added that the new model uses a transparent process to determine budget allocations to each unit.

“We also have two sets of dedicated research funds, the $28.5 million research incentivization fund and the budget of the Office of Senior Vice President for Research, which is determined by the amount of indirect coming into the University from external grants and contracts,” he said. “As research generates additional income, it will be reinvested into the research enterprise.”

Read also discussed the importance of graduate and undergraduate participation in research.

“Undergraduates are coming to Penn State because of the reputation of our degrees, which is due to the fact that we are a research powerhouse,” he said, noting that research experience can be lifechanging for undergraduates.

He added that graduate students are the backbone of the Penn State research operation.

“We are 15th in the country for the number of Ph.D.s that we graduate each year,” he said.

Read reiterated his commitment to the arts and humanities, noting that the work of scholars in those fields has tremendous impacts on society.

“The work that's done in the humanities, in theater, in music — it can change lives,” he said. “Our scholars in these areas are on the national stage and are making big contributions to national debates. We should be thinking very hard about how to continue to help people in those areas flourish.”

Read also touched on the Commonwealth Campuses and reminded the community that the University is investing in public impact and community-engaged research. He mentioned the University’s efforts to improve research commercialization efforts, including expanding the number of staff involved in licensing and patents in the Office of Technology Transfer and funding to help principal investigators move projects toward commercialization.

“We've done poorly in the past in the research commercialization space due to a shortage of resources, but we are doubling down on that right now,” Read said. “We are expanding the number of folks who are trained to assist with license and patenting processes, and we are putting money into a GAP fund, which helps to move projects forward in the commercialization pipeline.”

Read emphasized that this conversation isn’t the end, and that he and others are keen to hear from everyone in the research ecosystem at Penn State. To provide feedback on the conversation, an anonymous survey is available to help inform discussions.