Over the past decade Rice has made an unprecedented investment in developing research expertise in four major areas: nano, bio, info and enviro. Three new buildings in support of these interdisciplinary areas (the CNST building shown to the left is one example) have been constructed over the past five years. More than thirty new faculty at all levels, have been recruited specifically because of their expertise in nano-bio-info-enviro. Campus institutes, such as CNST and EESI, designed to catalyze interdepartmental interactions have been well supported through aggressive fundraising campaigns. These efforts position Rice to become an international leader in each of these emerging disciplines. To take full advantage of this investment in interdisciplinary research, Rice must develop its research infrastructure. Facilities that support electron microscopes, magnetic resonance spectrometers, and clean rooms, for example, are the necessary framework that supports any nano-bio-info-environ research program. They are the bricks and mortar tools that will make it possible for Rice’s faculty to become leaders in the new areas of photonics, bioinformatics, nanotechnology and environmental systems.

This document lays out a five year roadmap for matching Rice’s shared equipment infrastructure to its excellence in nano-bio-info-enviro. Our goal is to create a financially healthy organization which effectively administers and anticipates the needs for shared experimental equipment. At the core of this plan are three primary activities:

Management Policy Fundraising

A key element of our strategy is the consensus and participation of faculty across campus through the Shared Equipment Authority. Below we outline the needs in this area over the next five years, and then describe the elements of our strategic plan.

Shared Equipment Needs of Science and Engineering Research Faculty

The expenses of shared equipment fall into three categories: acquisition, staff support and maintenance. Below is a breakdown of this budget into these categories:

Category Total 5 yr Cost Fraction of Total Maintenance $1,160,050 0.09 Staff $1,908,048 0.14 Equipment $10,193,572 0.77 TOTAL $13,261,670

The details of this budget are available from SEA, and will be appended to future versions of this document. An important observation, however, is that maintenance and staff represent a quarter of our anticipated needs. The charts below illustrate this in the case of one instrument, a field emission TEM. While the purchase cost for this instrument is $1.2M, over a decade lifetime the cumulative costs of maintenance and staff almost equal the original capital investment. This data underscores the importance of long-term planning in equipment acquisition.

Objective #1. Management: Create and nurture campus-wide faculty oversight of shared equipment planning and administration.

Current climate: Faculty that critically depend on shared equipment are very reluctant to share control over these instruments. Many feel that their research programs will suffer unless they have nearly complete authority over user policies, fees and administration. As a result, small faculty groups and departments will set up ‘fiefdoms’ to operate instrumentation for their own particular interests; this results in an enormous duplication of space, staff and maintenance resources. For example, this university has invested over the past 5 years in the acquisition and maintenance of 8 x-ray diffractometers, two in the last three months alone; these machines are spread among four departments with varying levels of public access and faculty oversight. Similar duplications exist for scanning electron microscopes, nuclear magnetic resonance instruments and GC-MS systems. It is true that for many of these techniques, the specific user base (i.e. biologists as opposed to chemists for example) require separate instruments with different capabilities. However, these distinctions are becoming less pronounced in the new interdisciplinary paradigm while the duplication of efforts continues to waste valuable resources.

Future Goals: Establish and support an interdepartmental, interdivisional faculty oversight group charged with the management of shared experimental equipment resources. The deans of science and engineering in 2001 started the shared equipment authority to begin the process of developing faculty trust in institution-wide infrastructure management. SEA is the author of this document. Form smaller sub-groups out of SEA to handle detailed decision making on particular instruments, and include in these groups any interested faculty. SEA has begun this process by starting user groups for many shared instruments Mandate the SEA to submit budget requests annually to the deans. Provide staff, administrative and financial support for SEA.

Recommended policy changes: The management of shared experimental equipment should be split from that of shared computing equipment. Decisions to add existing instruments to the list managed by this group should be voluntary, and SEA should receive additional resources as its management efforts expand.

Objective #2. Policy: Revise institutional policy on cost centers to allow for more efficient management of shared research equipment.

Current climate: The Rice cost-center policy, drafted in response to government regulations concerning the accounting of fees for shared equipment, dictates quite severe accounting procedures for any campus organization that collects fees from federal grants. As it now stands, multimillion dollar electron microscopes are subject to the same restrictions as department photocopiers. The Rice cost center regulations remove any flexibility in financially managing instruments, and are the biggest roadblock to developing an effective organization for shared equipment.

The rules on cost centers were created here at Rice; the federal government provides only a brief paragraph in its OMB cicular on shared equipment and does not recommend any specific policy. Indeed, an informal survey of other privately funded research institutions indicates that Rice policy in this area is abnormally restrictive.

Policy recommedations: Create a more flexible cost center policy for large equipment management. Treat cost centers for office equipment and services differently from those for research equipment maintenance. Establish a joint research accounting/SEA working group to draft a new cost center policy for shared equipment management.

Objective #3. Fundraising: Raise funds, through both federal and private sources of funding, for shared equipment acquisition and maintenance.

Current climate: Rice has been very good at raising money for capital equipment, especially through private sources. The CNST campaign alone brought $5M to campus for instrumentation; several smaller federal grants in the nanotechnology area have added several other key instruments since 1996. However, there are relatively few sources of money for equipment maintenance and administration. For this reason, the shared equipment facilities have run in the red for several years.

Category Rice User Fees External Maintenance 0.19 0.55 0.26 Staff 1.00 0.00 0.00 Equipment 0.33 0.00 0.66

In our proposed budget, we anticipate using federal sources with Rice matching for most of our acquisitions. Federal funds for maintenance and staff are much more difficult to generate. For this reason, we must rely on Rice and user fees to meet these needs.

Here at Rice, user fee revenue has traditionally not offset the instrument costs in most cases. The reasons for this are twofold: first, Rice is a small campus with relatively few faculty compared to other private research institutions. Thus, the on-campus user base is small and most instruments while essential for conducting research are used at only 40-60% capacity. Second, for much of the shared equipment there has been no staff support for upkeep and training. Given the university culture, staff are awarded to departments to maintain internal instruments. Shared equipment has had no lobby for institutional support, and thus no staff. As a result, there is no mechanism for training users or keeping instruments well maintained. This has resulted in significant downtime on instruments (the TEM was down over 20% of the time one year) which inhibits the development of a stable user group. Limited staff support has also curtailed our ability to attract external users. Thus, we estimate slightly more than half of the instrument maintenance costs can be realistically gathered through user fees.

Future goals: Develop annually one or two campus wide initiatives for interdisciplinary efforts that could lead to centers/initiatives/institutes to provide targeted equipment support. Aggressively pursue federal monies for equipment acquisition and maintenance. Obtain institutional support for shared equipment and use this as a pool for matching funds for federal acquisition grants. Charge the SEA with supporting these fundraising efforts. Increase the user fee income by encouraging larger user groups through increased staff support, targeted training programs and development of an external user base.

Recommended policy changes: Mandate the SEA to submit budget requests annually to the deans. Do not provide institutional matching money for shared equipment without an SEA approved ten year plan for meeting maintenance costs. Provide in assistant professor start-up packages, where relevant, monies to go directly to SEA to allow new professors to have free access to all shared instruments during their first two years at Rice. Do not allow major shared equipment, or access to those instruments, to be used as cost-sharing on new federal grants without approval by the SEA.

Conclusions Our aim is that in five years Rice will have the research infrastructure to match its excellence in cutting edge research areas. Rice brings great resources to the problem of research infrastructure: a motivated and focused research faculty, adequate space for housing instruments, and a long history of interdisciplinary partnerships. Our plan leverages these strengths in its central organization: the SEA, a faculty oversight group for shared equipment management. Strategic investment in shared equipment, and the evolution of institutional policies, will overcome the critical challenges for equipment maintenance.