Franklin College Innovation Initiative 2025 – the next quarter-century

Part 2 of 3 – Research Partnerships and Public Engagement

Franklin College has introduced a three-part Innovation Initiative guiding its efforts and focus into the next era of American higher education. The initiative consists of three pillars designed to complement each other and work together: 1) Academic Innovation, 2) Research Partnerships and Public Engagement, and 3) Student Success. In the second of a three-part series of interviews, Franklin College Dean Anna Stenport unpacks the Research Partnerships and Public Engagement pillar, and the plan for its implementation. 

Research and Public Engagement are critical elements of the UGA mission – how does research and engagement give expression to academic innovation in the Franklin College?

Anna Stenport: Expression presents an apt descriptor here, as we align the Franklin College with UGA's three-part mission of teaching, research and service. As Academic Innovation helps modernize our arts and sciences curricula it empowers students and faculty across multiple disciplines to embrace creativity, collaboration, entrepreneurship, research and leadership as integral parts of their academic journey. Research partnerships focus on creating new opportunities for our faculty and students to work across disciplines and sectors – to bring the forward-looking, talented problem-solving acumen on our campus into new collaborative environments, no matter where these might exist. From computing and life sciences to humanities, our faculty colleagues already have deep experience reaching beyond subject matter to leverage expertise to improve STEM education, as just one example. From geography and atmospheric sciences, geology to mathematics and the arts, there are many others we want to highlight as opening for new partnerships to come.

We strengthen the UGA learning environment when our students learn from and participate in faculty collaborations across campus, as well as with industry. Students see the fruits of these associations and how they can help integrate collaboration as part of a meaningful, impactful career.

And that learning environment naturally extends the Innovation model to enhance multidisciplinary research collaborations?

AS: Research and the generation of new knowledge is critical for our college, the university, and the state. Franklin leads the university in large, team-based science, for example, and in research expenditures, which also means that our faculty are collaborating well outside the boundaries of Franklin. The changing national landscape presents multiple challenges; uncertainty surrounding extramural funding streams will mean adapting in this new environment and identifying new routes to secure research support. This dynamic of volatility only underscores the critical role of research innovation going forward, as sponsoring sources become even more competitive.

The Franklin College is inherently constructed to spur collaborations that blur or break disciplinary boundaries. For example, an ongoing effort to develop new technologies to find MIAs in Palau. Working in conjunction with the nonprofit organization Project Recover, the endeavor is comprised of a multidisciplinary team from history, chemistry, geography and the Center for Geospatial Research as well as alumni and includes the use of eDNA (environmental DNA) as well as remote sensing in support of locating the remains of soldiers listed as missing in action.

To further advance forward-thinking scholarships and partnerships, new strategies, cultures, and best practices we want to augment, rather than replace, the current ecosystem. 

How have new ideas emerged and how do you envision that process extending throughout the college?

AS: One of our goals already in practice is cultivating a culture that supports faculty innovation and creativity. These steps include multidisciplinary cluster hires, scaling operations through research scientists, jointly appointed faculty, and other innovative appointments, which can include large training grants for doctoral students; vertically integrated research teams, which will involve teams of undergraduate students from different disciplines working under the guidance of grad students and postdocs who are mentored by faculty; international collaboration through the development of strategic partnerships and agreements; and distributed leadership and faculty development to elevate our culture and ecosystem.

How does the college empower faculty and research leaders to think outside of current paradigms that may have served them well up to this point?

AS: The grand challenges facing society as well as pace-setting innovation are inherently multidisciplinary and will require collaborative scholarship and creative inquiry that erodes traditional disciplinary boundaries. Faculty are already very aware of this dynamic and attracted to its potential for breakthroughs and new therapies. In concert with the new UGA school of Medicine, there is tremendous excited for advancing a broad range of health initiatives. Making the most of new tools from imaging to computing power helps maximize a state-of-the-art environment for research and scholarship. Research drives innovation, impacts public policy, and shapes instructional excellence. 

When individuals or groups of faculty hit upon new collaborative ideas, how will the college nourish that effort to help research projects mature?

AS: A collaborative research ecosystem is the result of many formal and informal efforts, all pointing in the direction of enhancing collaboration. Competitive seed funding at the college level, for example, provides the affirmation necessary to secure faculty partnerships beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and we can see this from our two new seed grant programs the Rapid Interdisciplinary Proposals (RIP) and Innovation in Interdisciplinary Instruction (I-Cubed). Our new Research Intensification System (RIS) is designed to support faculty in incubating big ideas and spur opportunities with multidisciplinary research teams.

Research clusters also promote cross collaboration, team science, and engagement. The College envisions a scalable research ecosystem emerging from strategic cluster hiring in areas having significant potential for attracting extramural research dollars, including industry.

One strong example of creative ingenuity at the faculty level across Franklin units is the GROVI initiative pioneered by two faculty members in the department of mathematics and the Lamar Dodd School of Art, an umbrella of creative projects that will involve students and faculty in math and design, is funded by a recently-awarded five-year National Science Foundation grant for the Geometry and Topology group.

On the informal side, this year the Dean's Faculty Advisory Council launched a series of faculty research mixers coordinated by faculty across the five divisions of the College. Promoting the culture of engagement across the faculty creates a strong forum to present new ideas and get feedback from colleagues – allowing for access to a greater variety of perspective that can really make a difference for truly innovative projects and ideas.

The establishment of an Office of Research Innovation to complement the Academic Innovation Office will help us work thematically and across the entire college, with distinct purpose, objective, aims, and goals to advance our core priorities.

How does this Initiative formalize the public-private partnerships and building relations with industry?

AS: We are standing up faculty committees across the college’s divisions to provide guidance and feedback to enhance the Franklin College faculty-industry engagement ecosystem. Starting with the division of life sciences and the School of Computing, we want to build strong collaborative partnerships between our faculty and the UGA Innovation District and Office of Business Engagement, with the goal of positioning Franklin faculty to take full advantage of industry engagement opportunities.  

And relationship-building is key. We plan to implement workshops on matchmaking and best practices for communicating with foundations and companies, bringing internal and external stakeholders together to arrive at concrete next steps. While critical to our success, strategic and tactical thinking is required to develop pathways, engagement, and protocols for how we interact.

At a faculty-driven research university like UGA, the Franklin College has an outsized responsibility to lead, to introduce new ideas about directions within organized areas of inquiry but also to launch innovative new ways to collaborate and connect. Our faculty are proving eagerly adept at advancing cooperative engagement. And we're just getting started.