After a long and distinguished tenure as a faculty member, clinician, research scientist and administrator in UVM’s College of Medicine, Richard Galbraith was named UVM’s vice president for research in July 2014. UVM Today recently sat down with Dr. Galbraith, an M.D. who also holds a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology, to learn what the priorities of the office will be under his direction and what new programs he has in the works. 

What is your overarching goal for the office?

My primary interest is to find ways to aid and abet the faculty in doing their research, scholarship and creative work in a more efficient, effective and productive way. I want this office to support the faculty and help them be successful; to make it easier for them to take the ideas that they have, obtain the necessary extramural funding if it's available, or find intramural funding if it's not available externally, and then help them all the way through the process to do the work that we want them to do to enhance their own and UVM’s reputation nationally and internationally.

You’re very interested in promoting interdisciplinary research. Why?

The most important reason is that I think it’s interesting intellectually, and often the most interesting work arises at the interstices between disciplines. Also, the funding agencies have clearly realized this and have expanded their traditional focus on supporting the single investigator plowing a lonely furrow in their particular discipline to encouraging interdisciplinary work. So, if we’re to be effective in getting funding, we need to go after interdisciplinary funding, not at the expense of disciplinary funding, but in addition to it.

You’re about to launch a program called the Faculty Activity Network, or FAN, that’s a kind of incubator for interdisciplinary work. Can you tell us about it?

Yes. The shortcut version of FAN is, 'Take a walk in my shoes.’ The idea is that a faculty member in one department would invite a small group of faculty from other departments and units to spend a morning in their laboratory, office, studio or wherever they work, to show them what they do. The meeting would be followed by lunch in Waterman Manor hosted by President Sullivan and me, where everybody would talk about the experience and what they learned. And occasionally there may be some genuine intellectual spark that occurs between two or more people, and if that were the case, we would offer small feasibility funds for people to explore how they might work collaboratively. We'll be announcing the program officially before the end of the semester.  

What is your office doing to make sure interdisciplinary research, some of it crossing academic units, continues to thrive in an incentive-based budgeting environment? 

At some other universities, interdisciplinary work between units has appeared to decline in the IBB world. At UVM we established an interdisciplinary subcommittee within the IBB process from the get-go, which isn’t typical. One initiative to address the concern about an IBB-related drop in interdisciplinary work is a grant program I expect to announce soon. Grants will be available to two or more faculty members from two or more different departments and/or academic units who show that the work that they plan is clearly interdisciplinary.

One result is that the REACH grant program will now focus more on supporting work in the disciplines, right? 

Yes, REACH has been successful is helping fund research, scholarship and creative work in all disciplines, but has been especially helpful for those where a small grant of several thousand dollars can really help launch a project, which has often meant in the social sciences, humanities and creative arts.  Since we will now have a separate program funding interdisciplinary work, REACH will likely evolve to be more focused supporting faculty working in one discipline. 

The STEM complex is tentatively scheduled to break ground next summer. What will it bring to UVM?

First and foremost, it increases our ability to provide excellent, state-of-the-art STEM education to our undergraduate students. Over 90 percent of UVM undergraduates take at least one STEM course, and 50 percent will be involved more intensively in STEM. The complex will also enhance graduate education in the STEM disciplines and will enable STEM faculty to expand and be more successful, more interactive, more productive.

You have impressive credentials as a clinician and research scientist. STEM is clearly a high priority for you and this office. But you're also very supportive of the humanities and creative arts. Tell us about that.

If you distill it down to its essence, the basic job of a faculty member is to teach and be creative. In science, that creation could be the development of a new hypothesis. For a historian, it could be the way you synthesize information about a particular society 200 years ago. Or it could be creation in the way that most people immediately think of, which is creative arts. The act of engaging deeply in something that you understand and know about and bring your creativity and knowledge to is what I value about faculty. It seems to me you can't have completely separate bins for research, scholarship and creative arts. They are part of a continuum, and I think it's important that all of those components are recognized and supported. 

You’re about to add a new a position to your office that will be of great help to  faculty competing for large, complex grants. Can you give us the details?

Yes. We’re adding what we call a grant proposal manager to the office, who would help shepherd large, complex grants -- involving multiple faculty from multiple disciplines writing proposals that are up to several hundred pages long -- from the very beginning of the process of thinking about how to approach the grant, to providing support all the way through, to the final point where you upload the proposal to the funding agency. That's a huge amount of work and effort, and to have somebody who specializes in that, and brings that expertise, should not only relieve faculty of the burden of having to do all of these things, but should also make the grants more competitive, so that we get more successful funding results out of it.

The program will be announced soon on our website, and there will be a published prioritization schema for who has first dibs on trying to get the use of this assistance.

You also have a program in the works that would give faculty media training. Why is that a priority? 

I think that our ability to talk about what we're doing in a way that is digestible to ordinary people is increasingly important. If we want to engage with Vermont and the businesses of Vermont, or with national audiences outside of the state, we can't be successful if we speak in jargon and abstract terms that nobody can follow. So I think it behooves us at the university to improve our ability to talk about what we do, whether in print media, television, radio or on YouTube.

The concept is to create a website that provides practical advice to faculty who have been contacted by media. If they hear from a media outlet, we also want faculty members to get in the habit of calling designated communications staff at the university who have been trained to offer this kind of assistance. We’ll be announcing more information about this program in the coming months.

There have been some changes in the Sponsored Project Administration in recent years that improved efficiency and effectiveness. But you’re looking at making further improvements. 

A few years back what now constitutes SPA was divided into two functions housed in different departments: a pre-award group and a post-award/financial group. That organization led to some challenges in customer service and efficiency. Under the re-organized SPA, the two function were combined in one unit, and things have improved greatly. But there’s room for further improvement. We’re organizing focus groups to look at the current process, and invitations to participate have gone out to all principal investigators and business managers. If there are other people interested in participating, they should contact Anita Lavoie in the Office of the Vice President for Research.