Research drives ideas among UK faculty

By Anne Halliwell

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UK faculty may all work for the same university but they do not all get the same funding for research.

“It’s a competition,” said  UK’s Vice President for Research Jim Tracy. “Those individuals who come up with the brightest ideas get grants. People who don’t ask very good questions … won’t get funds.”

Tracy said that research is a component in tenure decisions, especially in science fields, but did not consider that as pressing a concern as building a reputation for oneself and one’s university.

“I spent 30 years competing for grants among the faculty and I can tell you — you want the money,” Tracy said. “You want the recognition of your peers. You want to ask the next question that drives people to pursue it.”

But it’s difficult to correlate research dollars with publications or achievements, Tracy said.

He pointed out that different schools of research cost different amounts per unit of output, so directly connecting the amount of money put into published research is tough.

The hypothesis that researchers design experiments around cannot be formally proven, only disproven, Tracy said. When an experiment doesn’t back up a hypothesis, that outcome could be more conclusive than if the hypothesis had been supported.

“Nature did not work the way you thought it would … a lot of experiments don’t work and then end up in a research notebook on a shelf … but that doesn’t mean that nothing was learned,” Tracy said.

There is an ongoing discussion in the scientific community over whether failed experiments should be published for consideration, according to Tracy.

“One way to say it is ‘we learn from our failures,’” he said.

He maintained that one researcher’s unpublished experiment could be the stepping stone to new discoveries.

“People who find that exciting tend to go into research, people who find that frustrating tend not,” Tracy said.

UK received about $292 million in research dollars from grants and contracts last year, according to Tracy.

The 2012-13 Fact Booklet budgeted another $278.3 million for research from the university.

“The (way to be) the institution that gets the most research (published) is to have the best people,” Tracy said. “And to have the facilities to perform that type of research.”

He said that a campus can choose certain research focal areas and then hire faculty who are also interested in research in that field.

“The job of the university … is to get the best faculty they can find and then the university provides the infrastructure,” Tracy said.

Once hired, though, researchers choose where to focus within their field.

“It’s really initiated by the intellectual curiosities of the researcher,” Tracy said. “What one person finds interesting, the next person will not.”

While it may be difficult for a researcher to secure grants if their experiments tend to fail, Tracy said that usually their university funding is not cut.

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