“Excellence and equity in research and teaching is really what we're all about”

MSU Today with Russ White

MSU Strategic Plan 2030 identifies goals within six key themes: student success, staff and faculty success, discovery, creativity, and innovation for excellence and global impact, sustainable health, stewardship and sustainability, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

On this edition of MSU Today, we'll be focusing on the discovery, creativity, and innovation for excellence and global impact theme of the plan with its executive sponsors: Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Teresa Woodruff, Executive Vice President for Health Sciences Norman J. Beauchamp Jr., and Vice President for Research and Innovation Douglas Gage.

“MSU has extraordinary people and an extraordinary capacity to really make a difference, and our job is to help them succeed and find ways to reach their full potential in their research work and have the full impact it should,” says Michigan State University President Samuel L. Stanley Jr., M.D. “That involves reducing the barriers for them to submit grants and making it easier for them to work within their grants and facilitate the valuable work they’re doing.

“That involves exciting new facilities like FRIB and collaboration with scientists around the world. It’s about having impact. Extension helps us to be good at applied research. We have an ambitious goal of $1 billion in research expenditures. That will take a lot of work, but I’m excited about the pathway to get there. This is an area where we really change people’s lives and make a difference, not just on our campus and in our state and the country, but in the world. MSU is doing that every day, and this is an opportunity to do it on an even larger scale and have greater impact.”

At Michigan State, we pursue excellence in service to the common good, generating new knowledge and applying it to address complex societal problems. When we say discovery, creativity, and innovation for excellence and global impact, what do we mean and how will growth and annual research expenditures to $1 billion help us have more local and global impact?

“Excellence in the service of the common good is a phrase that I just really gravitate toward,” says Woodruff. “And I think our tripartite mission of teaching, research, and outreach and engagement really represents the different ways in which that excellence in service to the common good is lived out. If you did a word cloud of what I just said, we've got a lot of ands, not ors. We interdigitate in each of these areas. Our faculty teach and do research, and then they apply that work to help solve real-life problems in real communities that affect real people.

“And I like to think of MSU as having research and scholarship reach. As we continue to grow our research expenditures, I think we'll be able to accelerate what we're able to learn as we think about the grand challenges that our world faces. I'm really excited about our global impact initiative. It really is going to support the growth and accelerate the pace of discovery by recruiting new faculty in some of the most exciting areas of research. And by growing this annual firepower within research and scholarship, I think we're going to go deeper and broader in what we do. We're going to be able to act locally and globally in solving the world's most pressing needs.”

“Growing our research expenditures to $1 billion means that our research activities are going to expand by more than $250 million annually,” adds Gage. “And so, we'll be conducting more research, which means we'll be making more discoveries and ultimately educating more students and bringing more solutions forward. And we're going to be working to expand our research programs across the board and increasing activities in some critical areas, such as equitable healthcare, climate change, mobility, international development, and many other programs which are critical both globally and specifically to Michigan and the United States. We're going to be working across the entire campus to try to build on these new programs. And many of them will be interdisciplinary. We're going to have a lot of interactions over the next few years, and we're really looking forward to that.”

“This effort really looks at improving health by promoting treatment and prevention,” Beauchamp says. “It contributes to society by driving economic growth and productivity and by helping to address social determinants of health through access to education and job creation. And it expands biomedical knowledge by funding cutting edge research and cultivating the future biomedical workforce of today and tomorrow. I’m excited about what this means in terms of MSU's land grant mission and this essential arm and what's needed to bring health, hope, and healing to all people.”

What are the key areas that will be part of this push to $1 billion?

“That $1 billion is a big number, a huge number,” Woodruff continues. “It feels big, and it feels ambitious. And I think that's really exciting. We have enormous strengths that really rise out of our roots of this land-grant university. Our plan is to bring together disciplines in new ways and to think about how we can intersect between new ideas and state-of-the-art equipment and the ways in which problems emerge that we can uniquely solve. An example is the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams. We have an incredible facility, and that's going to allow us to play a vital role in the next generation of scientific leaders and innovators.

“This is a great example because it's coupled with our number one-ranked graduate program in nuclear physics. You combine superb faculty, outstanding facilities, and a number one graduate program. We can create what I call a spiral of excellence. A second area is in improving agricultural practices and food crop yields and food security, something that remarkably is on our horizon and something that MSU can uniquely work in. And then the last one is in educational research and preparing teachers and educational leaders and change-makers. We have a top-ranked College of Education, and the more we educate, the better the world is, and it is something that we're proud of. And it's in that educational domain that we're going to lean into with many other domains to reach that $1 billion.”

“The key is that it's not a single investment that's going to get us to that $1 billion,” says Gage. “It's really about building on a whole variety of things. There are areas of strength we can build upon, and we are also going to have an opportunity to go into new areas that are going to give us the chance to expand what we do at Michigan State University. That involves bringing in new faculty, new partners, and commercial entities and funding agencies who might work with us to develop some of these new ideas. If we had to reach the $1 billion number on one strategy, we wouldn't get there. We really must bring everything we have to bear on this. A lot of it is going to be interdisciplinary and developing new areas which MSU is positioned to really develop and take advantage of.”

“As we think about this effort in health, it really will take a convergence of strengths across the university,” adds Beauchamp. “You can look, for example, at the Pediatric Public Health Initiative. To be successful there in trying to improve the health of the community, it required expertise from education, communications, geography, toxicology, nutrition, epidemiology, psychology, child development, pediatrics, and more. The point is that as we think about how we'll move the dial on health disparities, it will be a chance for us to m...