Fostering a research “ecosystem”

Facing a bleak budget picture, US research universities and national laboratories are for the first time forming joint delegations to lobby key lawmakers as they consider funding bills for fiscal year 2013. The teaming strategy emerged from a mid-March meeting between senior research officials from 45 of the 61 members of the Association of American Universities and the directors or deputy directors of four national labs.

“All of us share the concern for federal funding for science, for maintaining this ecosystem for basic research across the mission-driven research of the labs and into partnering with industry,” says Ann Arvin, vice provost and dean of research at Stanford University. Although Stanford has a close relationship with SLAC, which it operates for the Department of Energy, researchers from many institutions experiment at SLAC’s two x-ray sources. The circumstances are similar for the other universities that manage DOE labs, including the University of Chicago, which runs Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of California, which operates Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Both ANL and LBNL offer light sources and nanoscience centers to university researchers. Universities have partnered with DOE labs in the formation of dozens of energy frontier research centers and energy innovation hubs.

“Both the universities and laboratories have essential parts to play, and each one needs the other,” notes Michael Witherell, vice chancellor of research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The labs provide the large facilities that thousands of university researchers use; the universities provide graduate students, undergraduate students, and a lot of scientific manpower that cannot be [found] just in the laboratories.” Witherell, a former director of Fermilab, says many members of Congress don’t know that DOE’s Office of Science funds and administers DOE’s basic science labs. Lawmakers on key committees who do become familiar with the office’s role are routinely replaced by a new crop of members who need to be brought up to speed.

Persis Drell, director of SLAC, recounts that when she and three other DOE lab directors visited congressional offices last spring, “we were having to educate them from ground zero that, for example, the DOE supported basic research. They weren’t even aware of that.” Such visits, notes Witherell, also help “dispel the notion that somehow what’s going on [in the Office of Science] is duplicating something somewhere else in government.”

Eric Isaacs, ANL director, describes the “prisoners’ dilemma” that the labs and universities face. “Either side could go off alone and compete with each other and end up losing everything, or we could go in together, maybe get a little less for the total, but in the end do a better job for US science.” With the exception of the universities that run labs, Isaacs notes, historically “there hasn’t been tremendous support by universities for the labs.” But now, he says, “It’s a zero-sum game at some level for all of us. As the budgets get tight, flat, or worse, we feel there’s a much better chance of the two of us going through this together, promoting science for the nation in general.”

Isaacs and Drell say they’re hoping the new partnership with universities gets the reception they had when they, Oak Ridge National Laboratory director Thom Mason, and LBNL director Paul Alivisatos visited Capitol Hill as a group in the spring of 2011. “We had a very crisp message of supporting the president’s budget request and the president’s priorities, and we just went around to any office we could get into and made the case for science,” says Drell. “We were told by staffers that it was very effective, and they wanted us to do it again this year.”

Still, institutions will continue to look out for their separate interests. “Universities and laboratories will always get across the message to their local congressmen and senators about what they do, and we’re not trying to suppress that,” says Witherell. “What’s new is a group that can talk about the whole university and lab complex together as an ecosystem for research in the physical sciences and engineering funded by the DOE.”