Cornell's research administration has taken on a new guise -- a quadrumvirate of vice provosts headed by Nobel Laureate Robert C. Richardson, the Floyd R. Newman Professor of Physics. As the university's new vice provost for research, Richardson will carry out a program based on the premise, he said, that "we have to make parts of the university much stronger, and keep the strong parts strong."
The new Vice Provost for Research Offices will affect all areas of science research at Cornell but, said Richardson, "I have a lot of ideas, but no rectilinear road map." His basic philosophy is "that a creative research program is always started by faculty and students and can never be centrally planned."
The three other members of the research administration team are Jack Lowe, director of the Office of Sponsored Programs, who also has been named executive vice provost for research, handling administrative duties; John Silcox, the David E. Burr Professor of Engineering, who will serve as vice provost, physical sciences and engineering. and Kraig Adler, professor of biology, who becomes vice provost for life sciences. Silcox and Adler will serve in their new positions on a half-time basis and will continue their research and teaching activities.
The new office will help implement the administrative restructuring announced by Provost Don M. Randel and President Hunter Rawlings last winter.
How will these four administrators mesh their duties? Richardson said: "We are a group of recognized scientists who have 86 years of combined experience as Cornell faculty members. We plan to circulate among the members of the Cornell research community, listen to their ideas and then do our best to facilitate their plans. By having the assistance of John, Kraig and Jack, I hope to be able to start some new projects and to learn a lot of new science."
Richardson is a multi-faceted researcher, teacher and administrator, and he will continue to be all three during his vice provost tenure. "I have spent a large part of my career teaching," he said. "And I intend to continue."
Many young Cornell students have benefited from Richardson's introductions to physics, whether at the level of physics 101 or 214 or at that of engineers and premed students taking physics introductory courses. His view is that faculty should be rewarded for both teaching and research and shouldn't be compartmentalized. "There are lots of outstanding researchers on campus who are also splendid lecturers and teachers and advisers," he said.
One of the areas that concerns him most is the climate for women and minority students entering research and teaching careers. "We're doing well in enrolling women in engineering, but there's no reason to be self-satisfied because this is a difficult problem nationally," he said. "We need to encourage more women to go into engineering and the physical sciences. The total is still only 15 percent of the population. I think women can have an excellent career in science and engineering. I think that some of the problems women have encountered, such as the issues of raising a family at the same time as balancing an academic career and overcoming the tenure hurdle in experimental science, have been formidable. But there are things that can be done to make the process more manageable. Those I favor are liberal leave times, extra sabbaticals during child-bearing years, and relaxing the tenure clock for a year so that women who decide to start a family don't feel they have to wait to do so until after they've obtained tenure."
Equally he is concerned about the relatively small number of African-American and Hispanic students at Cornell who choose careers in teaching or academic research. "The big problem that we have in bringing in more faculty that are minorities is the size of the pool," he said. He noted that the historically black colleges and universities provide more than half the total of doctorates in science and engineering among African Americans. "That's because they do a better job of nurturing the students and overcoming deficiencies in math than is possible at the big research universities," he said. Thus, he believes, the best strategy for Cornell is to enter into collaborations with historically black colleges' equivalent departments in such areas as faculty exchanges and mentoring programs.
"That is one of my goals: To figure out a way to effectively use Cornell resources to help the places that are training the African-American scientist," he said. "Cornell is already doing a pretty good job of mentoring its own students. What if we could use that Cornell culture to help students in historically black colleges and universities to see that a research career is a viable, exciting thing to do?"
Beyond the student community to that of research, Richardson sees a continued building on Cornell's strengths by encouraging the collaboration of researchers in different disciplines. Last year, Cornell's administration identified three "research initiatives," or areas where such collaboration could be profitable: Genomics, materials science and information science. However, Richardson said, he does not want to leave the impression that other research areas will be ignored.
"We have major investments in strong scientific areas that don't fit into those collaborative categories, such as astronomy and high energy physics. Picking those three initiatives is only a snapshot of a year ago when studies were done of what looked like the best bets for the university and multi-disciplinary efforts," he said.
In Richardson's opinion, such research priorities need to be continually revised. "These initiatives are not carved in stone but are continually being adapted to meet new realities," he said.
Most important of all for Richardson are faculty and students at Cornell, and, he said, all else is secondary to these. "My goal is to encourage people to dream. I believe in that very strongly. Then try to see if we can help find the resources to advance those dreams."
For Lowe, the importance of his new vice provost's job is that it will bring the Office of Sponsored Programs, of which he will remain director, into closer coordination with the Vice Provost for Research Offices.
"It is our intent to eliminate duplication in functions and make the support of the research enterprise at Cornell more efficient," Lowe said. Both offices, he said, will be expanding their efforts in the area of electronic research administration so they can stay current with the changes in sponsoring agencies as they adopt the use of new technologies.
Specifically, Lowe will be involved with the support of the centers that report to Vice Provost Richardson, coordinate all of the resource allocations from matching funds to contingencies and provide staff coordination among the four vice provosts. He also will remain responsible for Cornell's Animal Care Program.
Lowe graduated from Cornell in 1956 with a B.S. in agricultural economics. He served in the U.S. Army from 1956 to 1963 on active duty as a Nike missile battery commander and adjutant of an air defense artillery group in Europe, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He joined the Cornell staff in 1963 as a projects representative in the Coordinator of Research Office. He became associate director of the Office of Academic Funding in 1966, senior staff associate in Administrative Operations and Analysis in June 1977, director of administration and finance in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1978, and associate vice president for research and director of the Office of Sponsored Programs in 1986.
Silcox said: "I was lucky enough to begin my Cornell academic career in science at the start of the sixties, a decade when getting going in research required little more than a good idea. Realizing one's dreams, as Bob Richardson puts it, was not that difficult. Nowadays, it is very different. The competition for resources to pursue an idea is substantial and sometimes quite complex. For Cornell to be at the leading edge, we must sustain a stimulating environment for our students and ensure that they have access to the experimental apparatus, computational resources, libraries (whether digital or conventional) and any other tools they may need to carry out the research.
"For faculty at private universities in particular, the challenges in sustaining such infrastructure can be daunting. For the administration there are new demands for resources that simply were not expected a decade ago. Ultimately it is the students and faculty who will realize the dreams that will keep Cornell great. Our role in this new era, as I see it, is to work closely with our faculty in achieving this in as effective a manner as possible. University resources must be used as wisely as possible and we have to seek out new resources to supplement those we do have."
Born in England, Silcox graduated from Cambridge University with a Ph.D. in physics in 1961, and the same year came to Cornell as an assistant professor of engineering physics. He became a full professor of applied and engineering physics in 1970 and the David E. Burr Professor of Engineering in 1988. He has twice served as director of the School of Applied and Engineering Physics, and until last year was director of the Materials Science Center. He has a significant commitment to teaching, evidenced by the award of the Tau Beta Pi Excellence in Engineering Teaching Award in 1985.
Adler said that given the size and dispersed nature of the life sciences at Cornell, one important function of the Vice Provost for Research Offices will be to help coordinate these disparate activities, to focus the university administration's attention on new areas of opportunity, such as genomics and biodiversity, and generally to help facilitate the creative research activities of faculty and students. The life sciences, he notes, represent Cornell's largest and "most pervasive discipline," involving nearly one-third of faculty. His own specific area of research is in orientation and navigation behavior and the evolution and systematics of amphibians and reptiles.
Like Richardson, Adler also stresses the importance of teaching. He has been the principal professor in charge of biology 101, the freshman majors course, for the past 26 years. He has earned teaching awards from Notre Dame and Cornell, and last year he was the recipient of SUNY's Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Said Adler, "We must maintain strength in the traditional areas on which Cornell's scientific reputation rests, but at the same time create mechanisms that will allow us to become major participants in the emerging research disciplines." In many instances, this will require teams of scientists from different disciplines working together, he says, "on a scale previously seen only in a few areas of scientific endeavor, such as high-energy physics."
Investments of this magnitude, Adler said, will require faculty involvement and proper integration with the teaching curriculum.
Adler earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1968. He was assistant professor of biology at the University of Notre Dame from 1968 to 1972. He joined the Cornell faculty as associate professor of biology in 1972 and became a full professor in 1981. He has twice been chairman of the Section of Neurobiology and Behavior in the Division of Biological Sciences, and is the author or editor of eight books and over 100 technical papers.
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