| By Alan Janesch
Public Information |
As Penn State's newly named vice president for research and graduate school dean, Eva J. Pell has two distinct but complementary areas to deal with every minute of every working day.
As vice president for research, her charge is to maintain and further Penn State's standing as one of the premier research universities in the country. In fiscal year 1999, Penn State's total research expenditures increased by 5 percent over the previous year, reaching $394 million, and grants and contracts reached an all-time high of $280 million.
As head of The Graduate School, Pell wants to make the school the center of intellectual life for graduate students -- a place where they can learn to prepare for a multitude of careers, discuss their concerns openly and share approaches to solving problems with colleagues and associates both within and outside their own disciplines.
She already has instituted regularly scheduled "coffees with the dean" to spark conversation and starting in the fall semester will hold a special convocation for graduate students. Pell also wants to nurture the already-strong relationships among research, education and outreach at Penn State and foster an environment in which faculty and students doing research can interact with each other without encountering barriers among disciplines.
A plant physiologist for more than 25 years, Pell uses an example of a plant's cellular structure as a metaphor for the kind of interdisciplinary environment she wants to foster at Penn State.
"Cells function only if they have membranes around them," Pell said in a recent interview. "But they would not function if those membranes were impermeable to the movement of all kinds of things back and forth across them. The same thing is true at a university: You have to have colleges, you have to have departments. You have to have structure, or else you'd have chaos."
But the structures, she said, "should be there only to provide integrity, not to serve as roadblocks. I think we have come light-years from where we used to be, but the kind of interdisciplinary communication and collaboration I'm talking about is something we have to keep working at. I want this office to be a place where, through various kinds of encouragement, we can allow collaborative efforts to occur."
Pell's appointment as vice president for research and dean of The Graduate School was confirmed Jan. 21 by Penn State's Board of Trustees. In the following interview, she outlines her goals for the research and graduate-school communities at Penn State.
Intercom: What is your vision of what a large, public research university should be? What should it look like, and what should its goals be?
Pell: The University is a triangle, and each leg of that triangle -- research, teaching and outreach -- depends on the others for its success. One reason we do research is to engage students, and another is to do things that are going to benefit society. When we do research at the University, we don't just do it to create knowledge for its own sake. We do it because it's a wonderful way for us to teach students, both undergraduates and graduate students, about the research enterprise. At the same time we're succeeding at discovering new information that through technology transfer and other means of dissemination can be developed into products and processes that serve the public.
Intercom: People tend to associate research with graduate students, but aren't many undergraduates also doing research at Penn State?
Pell: Most research at Penn State goes on with the involvement of graduate students. Research grants usually carry graduate assistantships with them, and so graduate students are actively engaged in research. We have a lot of federally funded training grants, and those are marvelous because they allow us to compete for some of the very best students in the country. But there also are an amazing number of undergraduates doing research at Penn State -- more than 5,000 in 1999.
Intercom: What would you like The Graduate School's relationship with the graduate students to be?
Pell: It's extremely important for the graduate student body to sense that The Graduate School is their intellectual home, beyond their own graduate degree program and their own department.
In the fall we're going to start a convocation for graduate students. Up until now The Graduate School has not had a special event that says to graduate students, 'You're important to us as a community, and we welcome you.' So we're going to have a convocation that addresses some of the more global issues, like ethics in research and scholarship, the use of technology in teaching and other matters that transcend specific degree programs.
Intercom: On the research side, where do you intend to focus your energies?
Pell: Two areas: interdisciplinary research and technology transfer. For many years the paradigm for research and scholarship was the solo faculty member working in his or her lab, or writing a book on a computer or a yellow tablet. Everything was done in isolation, and that's what you were rewarded for. Today, the nature of the challenges that have to be addressed are such that it's the multi-investigator efforts that are going to yield results. Penn State has a long history of involvement in interdisciplinary efforts and having interdisciplinary research programs. With the advent of the consortia for the life sciences, environmental studies, children and families, and materials sciences, there's been an opening up of interdisciplinary productivity to a much broader population. One of my goals and responsibilities is to see to it that the consortia are successful, that they reach a lot of faculty, that faculty really engage with the consortia and that we do everything we can do as a university to make sure that people transcend the walls and work together in new, different, and more productive ways. The other area is technology transfer. We're in our infancy with technology transfer at Penn State, but the Research Park shows promise, and we have an opportunity to do a lot of development there. The University's technology transfer operation is showing continued growth and there is a heightened focus on the commercialization of faculty research. To date, five companies are housed in the Research Park, and seven are in the Zetachron Center, which was transferred to Penn State ownership last year as an incubator for new Penn State-related start-up companies. We have a gold mine here, and we have to get more of our technology to market. I am very committed to that.
The Graduate School is creating new programs as well as continuing old ones for graduate students, like the following:
A convocation designed especially for graduate students will be held from 1-5 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 20. Addressing the students will be University President Graham B. Spanier; Eva Pell, vice president for research and dean of The Graduate School; and Terrell Jones, vice provost for educational equity. John Harwood, associate professor of English and director of education technology services in the Center for Academic Computing, will address technology issues, and another faculty member will speak on ethics in scholarship. A graduate student will discuss his experiences. Also, time will be provided for networking and gathering information on topics from financial aid to housing.
A new program, "Coffee with the Dean" allows about 30 graduate students each month to join Pell for coffee, pastries and conversation on graduate student activities and concerns.
Pell said she wants coffees to "involve a cross-section of students -- master's degree students, Ph.D.s, young students, more senior students -- and I really want to talk to them about what's exciting, what's going on in their research and scholarly lives."
Students who would like to be invited to one of the monthly coffees with Pell should contact their program chairs.
Started this past semester, the "Conversations at Kern" series at University Park allows graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and Penn State faculty to talk about relevant issues. The next conversation, to be held Wednesday, April 12, focuses on coping with the stress of graduate education and research. It will run from 5-6:30 p.m. in 112 Kern.