Integrated Research Creates Broader Impact
Year 3
Year 4 Q1-Q3
Doug Gage Director, MSU BioEconomy Network, Office of the VP for Research and Graduate Studies
The past four years have been an exciting time for the researchers at Michigan State University participating in the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. Our partnership in the GLBRC has provided opportunities to collaborate across campuses and across disciplines that are unprecedented. While research collaborations between scientists and engineers are no longer rare in many fields, a number of projects in the Center have jumped much larger disciplinary boundaries. Within the GLBRC we have chemical engineers, economists, modelers and ecologists working together on a very challenging problem: how to deploy new bioenergy technologies in the rural environment. Sustainable deployment of new bioenergy technologies, ranging from agricultural practices to end use, has emerged as a critical national issue. The GLBRC is uniquely positioned to lead the way to solutions. These solutions will require the diverse insights from many different disciplines, as well as innovative communication and educational outreach programs. Innovation occurs most readily when different fields overlap, bringing together new ideas and technologies.
By using an integrated approach to biofuels research, GLBRC is leveraging this innovation to generate toptier research publications, new biofuel technologies and strategic partnerships. Collaborative approaches to science become contagious once investigators learn how advantageous they can be in problem solving. At MSU, we have leveraged advances from the GLBRC
“By using an integrated approach to biofuels research, GLBRC is leveraging this innovation to generate top-tier research publications, new biofuel technologies and strategic partnerships.” to expand collaborations even further. GLBRC Researcher Bruce Dale and MBI won a $4.3 million DOE grant to build an engineering scale plant for the ammonia fiber expansion pretreatment known as AFEX.™ This collaboration will test design factors for commercial scale-up, as well as produce sufficient AFEX™ material to evaluate it as an animal feed in a full-scale trial with dairy cattle. Working with animal nutritionists and veterinarians, we have gone beyond our bioenergy origins to explore the possibilities for having both fuel and food. Collaborations lead to very interesting places!
Year 2
1. AFEX™ is a trademark of MBI.
Year 1
Since GLBRC was founded in 2007, research output in peer-reviewed journals has grown at a steady rate. In the figure below, the gradual shift from black to red shows that as the publication rate has grown, more publications were authored by researchers from multiple labs within the Center. This reflects the trans-disciplinary collaboration that is a result of bringing 400 researchers and staff together in a Center model.
Collaboration 4+ Labs
19+
4-5
3 Labs
13-18
2-3
2 Labs 1 Lab 4
Journal Impact Factor
10-12 6-9
<2
new journals, book chapters
Journal Impact Factor is a measure of the average number of citations of papers published in a journal—which serves as a way to measure the influence of that journal within the scientific field. Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center