The Big Idea Magazine – Fall 2021 by UH Division of Research

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CHANGING THEMODEL OF RESEARCH The proposed 2022 White House Budget

– is more money the only answer?

FIRST THOUGHT

The Post-Pandemic by Sarah F. Hill

8 to 5

The commute, the water cooler talks, the in-person meetings. Have we missed these things? Or can the research enterprise, for the most part, stay virtual? “Many people who have been working from home are experiencing a void they can’t quite name,” said Jerry Useem in the Atlantic. Maybe getting back to our old routine will do us good. Tracy Brower in Forbes wrote, “Many of the reports of increased productivity were early in the pandemic. Some have dubbed this ‘panic productivity,’ attributing the early perception of increased productivity to the adrenaline boost people got from the sudden shifts in the nature and location of their work. Job loss was rife, and people may have been working like crazy in the hopes of staying visible, relevant and ensuring their boss thought they were still adding value — even from home.” But in the words of W.B. Yeats: “Things fall apart.” Studies are showing now that we’ve hit our breaking point a year and a half into the work-from-home onset. What do we miss the most?

The Commute It can’t be the commute. Or can it? “The work-from-home boom will lift productivity in the U.S. economy by five percent, mostly because of savings in commuting time,” said Enda Curren in Bloomburg. But Useem wrote specifically about commuting, and what he found was incredible: “In 1994, an Italian physicist named Cesare Marchetti noted that throughout history, humans have shown a willingness to spend roughly 60 minutes a day in transit. This explains why ancient cities such as Rome never exceeded about three miles in diameter. The steam train, streetcar, subway and

automobile expanded that distance. But transit times stayed the same. The one-way average for an American commute stands at about 27 minutes.” What are these 27 minutes, on average, good for? There are people who love to drive — it gives them a sense of control regarding their day. On your morning commute, especially If you take mass transit, you can clear your head, decompress, make errand-esque phone calls or listen to audiobooks and podcasts. That’s not all we miss, though.

The Office Michael Scott on the television show, “The Office,” said he makes “20 little trips to the cooler” and recounts the “20 little scans I do of everybody to make sure everything’s running smoothly, and the 20 little conversations I have with Stanley.” We may take considerably fewer coffee or water breaks than they are used to at the fictional Dunder Mifflin, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t healthy to stand up, stretch and make small talk with a co-worker for a short spell. According to SparkHire.com, fostering a sense of office camaraderie helps teams to perform better, improves their ability to work as a team and boosts employee retention rates. And university environments are meant to be experienced in person. The public art on campus, the leaves in the fall, all of the sensory cues that remind us we are in a collegiate atmosphere matter.

The Doppleganger Next, let’s introduce the concept of the double self: the work self and the home self. One needs to transition to the other. Jon Jachimowicz of Harvard Business School was quoted in the Atlantic as saying: “If you respond like a manager at home, you might be sleeping on the couch that night. And if you respond like a parent at work, it’s weird.”

yourself or rituals you can perform to “get ready” for working from home. These are readily supplied as you actually get back to the office or the lab. Showering, coffee stops, small talk in the elevator all signal that our day is really beginning.

The Thank You Note Some researchers were deemed essential workers and never worked from home, and even started shifts that were different from their older routines. Much research work needed to occur in actual lab spaces. If this applies to you, then consider this a thank you card from your colleagues who want you to know that while some of us were Zoom-ing and plugging away on computers at our kitchen tables, we acknowledge the struggle it was for you to cover every shift, every day. For instance, David Brammer, D.V.M., DACLAM, of University of Houston Animal Care Operations said of his staff: “Excellence is difficult to define but unmistakable when observed. Within Animal Care Operations, I have found excellence.” He went on to say that his staff encountered a variety of challenges, all while maintaining the highest standard for animal care. “By adjusting to the new normal rather than abandoning standards, focusing on the completion of tasks, working hard and staying positive, the staff of ACO successfully set an example for others to follow.”

One Last Thought It definitely comes down to what your institution’s

leadership has decided about back-to-work schedules, whether they be full time on-campus, at-home or hybrid. There’s something to be said for being able to adapt when in a pinch. It doesn’t necessarily mean, though, that things can’t transition back to the way they once were. Versatility, remember, is an indispensable trait.

So, it behooves us to make a real, tangible transition from home life to work life. If your institution has not opened back up yet, you can do this by dressing like you would at work. It will make doing chores around the house less tempting if you’re dressed for your actual job. There are other things you can say to

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TOP OF MIND

CHANCELLOR AND PRESIDENT RENU KHATOR

PUBLISHER

AMR ELNASHAI Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer

PUBLICATION DIRECTOR

THE STUDENT WORKER VS THE FELLOW

VIEWPOINT

LINDSAY LEWIS Division of Research

A CONFLICT OF CONFLICTS

EDITORS

SARAH F. HILL Division of Research CORY THAXTON Division of Research

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

MIGUEL TOVAR

DIGITAL MEDIA MANAGER

TIM HOLT

PHOTOGRAPHERS

JOHN LIENHARD

WRITERS

PROOFREADERS WEB DEVELOPER

BRIAN HERMAN SARAH F. HILL TIM HOLT LINDSAY LEWIS JOHN LIENHARD CLAUDIA NEUHAUSER CORY THAXTON TIM HOLT ASHLEY MERWIN

FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK

12 FEATURE

CHANGING THE MODEL OF RESEARCH

DARNELL THACKER

Send address and email updates to: University of Houston Division of Research 4302 University Drive, Room 316 Houston, Texas 77204-2015 Send feedback to: research@uh.edu The Big Idea is published by the Division of Research. Printed on Recycled Paper The University of Houston is an EEO/AA institution. 11.2021 | 5000 Copyright © 2021 by the University of Houston

A digital version of this publication is available at uh.edu/researchmag Cover: Artwork by Miguel Tovar

DOES ABSENCE REALLY MAKE THE HEART GROW FONDER?

PERSPECTIVES

CHECKING OUR BLIND SPOTS 24 DISCUSSION BOARD

THE ACCELERATION OF INNOVATION CONTEMPLATIONS

A REMARKABLE GOVERNMENT INVESTMENT

FROM THE TOP

A warm welcome-back to our regular readers and an enthusiastic welcome to our first-time readers. To provide context to the latter group, in this fifth edition of The Big Idea, we departed from promotional magazines to investigative academic journalism. We figured out that the best promotion of the University of Houston Division of Research and our research enterprise is to invest our considerable intellectual prowess in addressing the most critical research issues of our time. We intend the Division of Research magazine to be a discussion forum, not just an interesting read. We ask you to take a few minutes to comment, agree or disagree, and express whatever thoughts and feelings our articles stimulate. How can we get started on debating academic issues on anything other than the challenge of the decade, COVID-19? Believers and deniers alike are being affected daily, in every walk of life, by (a) the virus and (b) the varying reactions to its existence. Our first article takes sides to some extent and also provokes discussions on the pros and cons of off-site and on-site academic pursuits. We follow-up with a number of pragmatic job-related issues that often confuse and intrigue the academic community, and we express opinions in a manner intended to invite feedback. Our centerpiece is an article on the model of research. While it was written by our associate vice president for research and technology transfer, it also includes aspects of our ongoing soul-searching and consequential redesign of the UH research enterprise. Since 2017, our focus has been on societal challenges, not disciplines, when defining our research priorities. The article, however, does not necessarily advocate for the UH model. It is an intellectual piece that results from the exceptional insights that our AVPR has gained over the years in top academic institutions. We followup with a number of short articles on research blind spots, and how the innovation ecosystem has managed, or failed, to address COVID-19 challenges. We close with thoughts on how previous major infrastructure investments led to exceptional returns, and implicit hope for the current federal effort to move U.S. infrastructure to the 21st century and beyond. I would be remiss if I do not share with you the current excitement in the Division of Research because of the new UH focus on the substantial and unprecedented expansion of our research portfolio. Over the past 3-4 months, discussions, proposals and assessments have led our President to allocate central funds for the hiring of 100 new faculty, additional to replacement hiring, based solely on building interdisciplinary research teams that address our priority societal challenges. Moreover, central funds have been allocated to build five new core research facilities that will provide the tools to address our selected societal challenges. The first tranche of faculty hiring has already started, and the advertisements have been out for just under one month. Most of the hires are multi-college, and all the hires are designed to map perfectly over our five societal challenges and five necessary research core facilities. While our recent past has been spectacular, our future is guaranteed to be even more impactful.

Amr Elnashai, FREng

Vice President/Vice Chancellor for Research and Technology Transfer University of Houston/University of Houston System

TOP OF MIND

THE STUDENT WORKER THE FELLOW

Who you hire in your lab matters when it comes to employment regulations By Sarah F. Hill

Two students stand in a lab, pipetting their hearts out. They look as though they are doing identical tasks, but one is training and one is working. Which is which? It depends on the funding sources and their requirements, and not necessarily on the nature of the activity performed. In fact, classifying a “trainee” a “worker” — or the other way around — is misleading and could lead to audits by the funding agency and the IRS. Like in philosophy and many other disciplines, the intent is what matters. For instance, sponsoring agencies, such as the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, may pay stipends or participant support costs to trainees instead of salary and wages for performing a service. This stipend is paid to the student because they have been chosen for a specific type of training. We understand these to be fellowships/scholarships, training workshops, conferences or summer school programs. Of course, the sponsoring agencies also pay for salaried employees with all the implications that arise from that, including withholding payroll taxes.

THE BIG IDEA

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Though Principal Investigators (PIs) will argue, and rightfully so, that all graduate students in their labs are “trainees.” Beverly Rymer, director of Contracts, Audits and Policy at the University of Houston, said that often we have to remind PIs that any benefit they may derive from students supported as trainees is incidental. The purpose of the stipend is to benefit the student first and foremost, whereas a PI is the direct beneficiary of the work done by students paid a salary on their grant.

Semantics: Fellowships, student workers, workshop participants and interns “There is a student who works in my lab,” you may hear a faculty member say. Then that student must be paid through payroll and have the necessary taxes withheld from their paycheck. If the student is getting paid through a federal program classified as training and not “work,” then they are learning from a mentor. While taxes still need to be paid on this type of payment, it is completely the student’s responsibility. Reminding graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to pay taxes on their stipends is a good idea, but there is no federal tax withheld by the university with this sort of payment. “When I was a graduate student at Cornell, I remember we were reminded as students that we should put some of our stipend in reserve, since we would eventually owe taxes on it,” said Claudia Neuhauser, associate vice president for research in the UH Division of Research. “If a student is a participant — not an employee — the monies do not get run through payroll. But that doesn’t exempt the student from having to pay taxes. It’s just that the Office of Contracts and Grants and the tax office at the university system level do not take on any responsibility. The responsibility is completely on the fellow to pay taxes on their stipend,” explained Rymer. Stipend payments for students to attend workshop trainings are another area worth exploring. For instance, you’re a PI engaged in a project for a sponsor, but as part of the project, you proposed and budgeted for hosting a workshop. In this workshop, students will attend and learn about research techniques using Legos. You want to have the brightest students show up for the workshop, so you offer a stipend to each participant. The students who come are being trained by an expert in the field and, at any moment, a student could develop an innovative model or design component that the PI later incorporates into his or her work. The benefit to the student is what enables the university to classify the payment as a non-service stipend instead of compensation via payroll. The benefit to the PI or workshop leader — say, they really enjoy teaching or they get a new idea from the workshop participants — is incidental. Internships are a little bit different from fellowships. An internship status is determined by the extent to which the intern and the employer clearly understand that there is no expectation of compensation. Any promise of compensation, expressed or implied, suggests that the intern is an employee — and vice versa.

THE BIG IDEA

Problems arise Where does the discrepancy, which opens the doors to audits, fines and payback requirements, come in? The answer is with how you treat the student, not the nature of the work (to an extent) or even the faculty member’s genuine enjoyment of mentoring a student in the lab. The faculty member’s joy for teaching — the inventive, creative work of the profession — matters very little to the IRS. And if one were to treat a fellow/trainee like a worker, there will be audit consequences. There are two auditing bodies. The university’s tax office, presided over by a tax attorney, can be audited by the IRS. The tax office at the university level only cares about proving who is benefitting from the student’s performance; if, based on their review, the PI’s research is the primary beneficiary of the student’s activities, they view the payment as services that must go through payroll. At the same time, the Office of Contracts and Grants (OCG) can be audited by the federal agency, the Office of Inspector General. OCG must ensure that funds awarded by the various agencies are used for the purpose provided. “That’s where the big trouble comes in,” said Rymer. “If a funding agency gives you money for participants’ support cost, or fellowships/scholarships, and the university chooses to use it for salary and wages instead, this can become an audit finding.” For example, a department misclassifying an employee as a fellow could be found responsible for payroll tax withholding (FICA, federal and state income tax) for both the employee and the university — typically more than 40% of the amount paid. Conversely, suppose a department misclassifies a fellow as an employee using funds provided by an agency for fellowship/scholarship stipends for payroll instead; when audited, the university will be required to repay the government the stipend funds awarded. The IRS and university tax offices look for patterns. The consequence of paying back payroll taxes, not to mention fines that may occur, can be severe. It only follows that where one discrepancy arises, more will begin to surface — tax specialists will begin digging where there are red flags. If there are 1,000 stipends paid out to students and seven, for example, have come back with questionable tax practices, there will be an inquiry into that university’s practices. To avoid this, be sure you treat your fellows like trainees and treat employees as workers. Enjoy teaching or training the fellow how to pipette, in other words, but pay the worker to do the pipetting. Most importantly, include in stipend payments backup documentation a description of the training techniques, funding sources and tax office vetting checklist to reduce the chances that both types of auditors find the university non-compliant.

ATTRIBUTE

STUDENT WORKER

FELLOW

BENEFIT

Primarily benefits the university

Primarily furthers the student’s training and skill development

FUNDING SOURCE

The student was a recipient of salary/funding from a Research Project Grant (R01), Exploratory/ Development Research Grant Award (R21), NHLBI InvestigatorInitiated Resource-Related Research Project (R24) or Summer Research Experience Program (R25), through the NIH

Student was a recipient of a National Research Service Award (NRSA) fellowship program (such as T31 or T32 programs), the National Health Service Corps Scholarship Program or the Armed Forces Health Professions Scholarship and Financial Assistance program – all training grants

TAXES

Student pays taxes through payroll

Student is responsible for paying their own taxes

ACCOUNTABILITY

Student provides past, present or future services in order to receive monies

Student is responsible for reporting progress to the funding agency

FLEXIBILITY

Student has set hours and responsibilities determined by the PI

Student and PI agree upon hours observed by student, flexible to student

SUPERVISION

Student is subject to the same level and type of supervision over the conduct of his/her activities as a university teaching, research or similar graduate assistant employee

Little supervision required to complete tasks

ASSIGNMENTS

Projects are primarily determined by an advisor, supervisor or mentor

Projects are primarily determined by the student and PI through consultation

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VIEWPOINT

THE BIG IDEA

A Conflict of Conflicts THE CHALLENGE OF MANAGING DISCLOSURES AND RISK By Lindsay Lewis Meet Professor Doolittle, a biologist and chair of Genetics at Zoo U. After studying genetic mutations in small-ear pigs to better understand coat color variation for breed preservation and development, Doolittle and his post-doc invented a genetic test and launched a startup called PigMentation. The post-doctoral co-inventor runs PigMentation’s day-to-day business operations; she receives no salary from PigMentation but receives equity in the company. Doolittle is the chief technology officer. Like many faculty startups, PigMentation licensed the technology from Zoo U to begin commercialization. Due to the fact that the company does not have a laboratory yet to scale the technology, funds were raised by PigMentation to establish a sponsored research agreement with the university to support R&D in Professor Doolittle’s lab on campus. The company ultimately hopes to receive a National Institutes of Health STTR award and subcontract to Zoo U to supplement further development. In addition, Doolittle received additional research funding from a Hungarian agricultural company to study color variation in a large population of Mangalitsa pigs, the “Kobe Beef of Pork,” in Hungary. As part of this project, he partnered with an institution in Hungary as part of a collaborative research program that allows U.S. students to work in the lab overseas and Hungarian students to come to the U.S. Before kicking off the project, Doolittle will purchase 1,500 units at $179 per unit from PigMentation to do the first phase of the study. How many potential disclosures should Professor Doolittle make to Zoo U? How much potential risk does Doolittle present?

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DISCLOSURES

QUIZ!

SELECT THE DISCLOSURES PROFESSOR DOOLITTLE SHOULD FILE WITH ZOO U AND TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE! EXTERNAL CONSULTING, EMPLOYMENT AND PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES PENDING RELATIONSHIPS RELATED PARTY INTERESTS RESEARCH CONFLICT OF INTEREST CONFLICT OF COMMITMENT DUAL EMPLOYMENT

If you selected every disclosure listed in Professor Doolittle’s case, you are correct! But do you think Doolittle understands each little detail of his scenario and who manages that risk across the university? Is it the research compliance office, contracts and grants, human resources, legal or his department? And even if he succeeds in disclosing it all, can each individual office manage their part without introducing a certain level of risk to the professor, the university and the funding agency?

Risky Business While Professor Doolittle’s case is complex, it’s not farfetched. Better managing risk for cases like Doolittle’s is top of mind for university compliance operations right now. As the regulatory environment becomes increasingly complex, there is more at stake today than what senior investigators are used to, and that creates risk. “There are more regulations than in the past, there is more scrutiny. We’re not the same University we were 20 years ago,” said Lauri Ruiz, senior assistant in the University of Houston’s Office of General Counsel. “If researchers have an NIH grant, for example, they have to comply with federal regulations as well as state and institutional regulations.” In addition to changing and expanding regulations, there is also enhanced enforcement of the rules, said Ruiz, making it critical for universities and their researchers to comply. The problem: It’s hard to know every single detail that needs to be disclosed.

FOREIGN INFLUENCE

“There are a lot of people with good intentions, but they may not know about the rules,” she said.

LICENSING

And then there’s the matter of doing it. “Faculty want to do the right thing, but they don’t get around to disclosing it all,” said Kirstin Holzschuh, executive director of Research Integrity and Oversight at UH. “If we know about it, we can manage it before it becomes a problem.” To complicate the matter, many universities like UH have offices across the institution that manage specific disclosures, making it more difficult for researchers to know what to disclose where. “Universities tend to be very siloed and faculty get confused about what they have to do to be compliant,” said Susan Koch, chief compliance officer at UH. “There is a significant need for universities to make a seamless, cohesive process that is easy for faculty to follow.” According to Koch, Ruiz and Holzschuh, many top research institutions may have this process fixed for faculty, as they have been in the business of major research operations for many years now. For rising universities such as the University of Houston, compliance operations are scrambling to keep up with their university’s rapidly growing research and innovation enterprises — in addition to expanding regulations.

THE BIG IDEA

“It would be ideal to have a centralized operation that intakes all disclosures and works with specific university offices to manage certain aspects of a researcher’s case,” said Holzschuh. “But like many institutions, UH does not have the resources to support that kind of operation yet, so we have to find a different solution.”

Holistic Risk Management Much like we go to our primary care provider who reviews our overall health before referring us to specialists to solve specific problems, university compliance should work the same way. Centralized compliance management may be the future, but it’s not quite possible for many universities at the moment. “We have to find a way to move forward in a thoughtful way based on our available resources,” said Koch. “These are compliance challenges that are being discussed across higher education — everyone is trying to make strides in this area.” To address this challenge at UH, the University has launched a compliance initiative to streamline all university disclosures and ensure that all touchpoints and processes are more understandable for faculty to follow. Led by Koch, Institutional Compliance teamed with the offices of General Counsel and Research Integrity and Oversight to form a cross-disciplinary committee to consolidate the disclosure intake and management processes, as well as provide institutional training. “We’re setting up a communication structure so that silos are no longer silos,” she said.

“We’re hoping to eventually have a central repository of disclosed information so that compliance teams across the university have access to the same information,” said Holzschuh. “It’s difficult to manage a case piecemeal, because all of the small details are very interconnected.” The team will also make a major investment to “up their game” to better educate and communicate with faculty — and all those who support university research, including research staff and leadership. “We are excited about the portal that will help faculty fill out the forms,” said Holzschuh. “But education is key.”

The Big Idea In the coming year, the Professor Doolittles at the University of Houston — and hopefully other institutions across the nation — will better understand what disclosures need to be filed through simple, clear processes, thanks to the hard work and ingenuity of our university compliance teams. This could not be of greater importance, according to Ruiz. “This just isn’t the university coming up with random things to create roadblocks,” she said. “Non-compliance with federal and state regulations could result in jail time and millions of dollars in penalties sanctioned against the University.” To be quite frank, it’s in all of our best interest to comply with regulations — and make the processes easy to follow, especially if we want to continue to demonstrate our academic research integrity, keep monies in the university piggy bank and keep our people out of “the pen.”

Specifically, the UH team is working on a multiphasedapproach that will involve the development of a user-friendly web portal that will prompt faculty to fill out certain disclosures based on their individual case. The tool will work by taking faculty down a decision tree, triggering a set of actions they need to take. Based on how they answer certain questions, faculty will be directed toward the disclosures they need to file. “We want to design it in such a way that it is easy for faculty to navigate complex issues,” added Ruiz. In addition to creating the disclosure portal, the team plans to update disclosure forms, streamline processes and workflows, reevaluate who has oversight, and design education and training to ensure compliance. “The old paper-based processes don’t work anymore,” said Koch. “People can’t locate what form they need, so our processes need to be advanced.” And while modernizing and simplifying the process for faculty is a great first step, the team is already thinking about how to better manage the process on the backend in a more centralized manner. FA L L 2 0 2 1

FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK

Does Absence Really Make the

Heart Grow Fonder? Edited by Sarah F. Hill

“Funny You Should Ask” is The Big Idea Magazine’s recurring segment in which UH professors are asked to weigh in on an idiomatic saying, and their musings on this edition’s adage couldn’t be more different. The pandemic was indeed a strange predicament, as social distancing and isolation became the new normal. We changed the way we worked, interacted with family and friends, and sought entertainment. Our UH community members responded to the following age-old question: Does absence really make the heart grow fonder? Their takes on the topic are earnest, witty and even poetic, at times.

The heart specialist… This past year we have seen our lives change from our normal routine to one of constant uncertainty, where our expectations of life events — from the simplicity of going to the grocery store to major events — have been flipped upside down. As we each came from our rooms — either attending an online school session, teaching an online class or discussing research data via a Zoom meeting — we met together and discussed our days while enjoying lively family meals. We enjoyed taking our dog Poppy on long earlier-morning and late-evening walks. Now as light is appearing at the end of a long 18-month tunnel, the daily home interactions that I had grown to love once again became moments of merely crossing paths or FaceTime calls to bridge our distance. The absence of those unique bonding moments over family meals has made the heart grow fonder.

THE BIG IDEA

As a research scientist studying heart disease, I look for ways to increase the function of a diseased heart or even repair it following a heart attack; to cure the broken heart, one might say. Over the years our family of five will surely grow larger as our young adult children pursue their dreams. As we move forward from the pandemic, I am not only dreaming of making discoveries to repair the broken heart, but also am looking ahead to a time in which we will continue to embrace family and friends with the vigor of the pandemic, and in this way repair the heart’s absence. Bradley McConnell is a professor in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Houston. He teaches pharmacology and runs a laboratory researching ways to better understand cardiac signaling mechanisms, developing therapeutics for heart repair. McConnell looks for ways to increase the function of a diseased heart and repair them following heart attacks. McConnell and his wife, a high school biology teacher, have three daughters.

The hospitality expert…

The creative writer…

This is an interesting philosophical question ... If one is not really fond of someone or something, I would argue that absence would do nothing to change that feeling. In fact, absence might make one even less fond of that person or thing. I could also make the case that limited absence that results in missing a person’s warmth, personality, passion, and even oddities would increase one’s fondness for another. However, should that time apart increase to a point where one no longer misses or needs those things — or even finds other sources for them — then the opposite can be true.

After the vocabulary lessons: coronavirus; epidemic; pandemic; social distancing; flattened curves. After the long walks, movie marathons, virtual happy hours and family game nights. After physical isolation and miniscule COVID pods and FaceTiming with parents and siblings. After warily sending our daughter back to school. After being fully vaccinated. After mourning from afar. After 16 of the quietest, most reflective months of our lives (bouts of anxiety aside), we excitedly embarked on a family vacation/reunion.

Looking at this from an epistemological perspective prompts a different question. What is fondness? Is it amiability? Affection? Or is it simply partiality? I am, for example, partial to a glass of nice wine with dinner, but I do not necessarily feel affection for the vin de table. And while the European tradition of table wine with lunch is laudable, it is not a partiality for me. The best answer, perhaps, is found in asking this question: Do you want absence? If the answer is NO, then absence does make the heart grow fonder. Dennis Reynolds, Dean of the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management and a wine aficionado in his own right, found his heart definitely growing fonder of places he couldn’t visit during the pandemic, such as the Walla Walla Valley wine region in Washington or Stellenbosch, South Africa — the birthplace of Pinotage grapes, and, of course, Bordeaux, for which he has a particular affinity. A well-aged Château Lafite Rothschild would be the ideal vin de table, the absence of which would definitely make his heart grow fonder!

As we drove the final hilly leg of an 800-mile drive, and pulled up to the Franklin, Tennessee estate we’d rented for the week — with 12 family members! — the bubble we’d been living in, like my ears, popped. Car doors slammed. Children screeched. Grandparents beamed. My sister cried. We hugged. We kissed. We chose bedrooms. We laughed. We fired up the grill. We got drunk, figuratively at first, and then, quite literally. That evening, sitting around a fire, the kids roasted marshmallows while the adults boisterously made plans for future epic vacations. Colorado. Costa Rica. Italy. By the time my wife and I slid into bed, I was giddy. Our old life in NYC — years and years ago — had been like this. Obscenely loud. Surrounded by generations. Rarely alone. Back then it sometimes felt stifling. A bit overwhelming. Which factored into our desire to set out and forge our own path. But after so long apart? It felt like a piece of me, unwittingly severed and misplaced, had been re-attached. My heart was full. The following morning as the kids rampaged through the house, doors slammed, and people shouted Good morning! and Who wants coffee? as if they’d never heard of inside voices, my wife and I startled awake. Eyes full of sand, head heavy, I turned to her and chuckled. “Who the hell invited all these people?”

Piotr Chalimoniuk/iStock/Getty Images Plus Paffy69/iStock/Getty Images Plus Sankai/iStock/Getty Images Plus m-imagephotography/iStock/Getty Images Plus 4x6/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Giuseppe Taurino is the Associate Director of UH’s Creative Writing Program. Previously, he served as the Executive Director of Badgerdog Literary Publishing in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in American Short Fiction, B O D Y, Epoch, Green Mountains Review, New South, The Potomac Review, and elsewhere. These days, besides writing, he enjoys running and playing chess.

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FEATURE

CHANGING THEMODEL OF RESEARCH The proposed 2022 White House Budget

— is more money the only answer? By Claudia Neuhauser, Ph.D.

Associate Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer, Professor of Mathematics, University of Houston

Brian Herman, Ph.D.

Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering and former Vice President for Research, University of Minnesota and University of Texas Health, San Antonio

Solving our current societal problems through academic research and development (R&D) may require changing the model of research. The federal government is ready to fund real change into matters of the future — energy transition, health and racial equity, advanced manufacturing. Academia always welcomes more money for research and development. However, the current system of research is a barrier to solving complex societal problems. Changes in the reward system, inclusion of multiple stakeholders, and new models of knowledge transfer into communities are needed to maximize the impact of the ever-growing R&D budgets. Changes should come from within academia, and academia should not wait for government entities to impose changes.

THE BIG IDEA

sellingpix/iStock/Getty Images Plus 29mokara/iStock/Getty Images Plus kertlis/iStock/Getty Images Plus barbaraaaa/iStock/Getty Images Plus Ellerslie77/iStock/Getty Images Plus VPanteon/iStock/Getty Images Plus Daniel Balakov/iStock/Getty Images Plus

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Research universities have benefitted tremendously from federal research and development investments. In fiscal year 2019, the most recent year for which this information is available, 53% of research expenditures in higher education came from federal sources. Federal research funding has been instrumental for research universities to become an important part of the innovation ecosystem, and even more so after the enactment of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 that enabled universities to profit from inventions developed under federally-funded research. Today’s universities not only create environments where individual researchers and scholars expand the body of knowledge, but also enable the transfer of knowledge and the commercialization of new discoveries, and much of it with federal funds. The proposed 2022 White House Budget1 is strong on new R&D investments, particularly in areas that address societal needs, of which there are many. Let’s start with health: A CDC analysis2 stated that “the COVID-19 pandemic has brought social and racial injustice and inequity to the forefront of public health. It has highlighted that health equity is still not a reality as COVID-19 has unequally affected many racial and ethnic minority groups, putting them more at risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19.” Health isn’t the only area where investments in R&D are needed to address societal needs. The 2022 Budget focuses on “rebuilding America’s transportation infrastructure, water infrastructure, and broadband connectivity infrastructure” in its American Jobs Plan. It includes “building a clean energy future while investing in communities at risk of being left behind during our energy transition.” Increases in non-defense R&D “will boost America’s innovative edge in markets [...] like battery technology, biotechnology, computer chips, and clean energy.” The pandemic clearly showed that sustained funding for basic and applied research is invaluable. As an example, we got lucky that the mRNA vaccine technology was ready when we needed it. It took more than 30 years of research to develop this new technology, “two companies with vision, a longtime network of university labs, and decades of taxpayer funding.”3 It is doubtful that we would have been able to produce such a highly effective vaccine within a year of the initial outbreak without those prior investments. The pandemic also made clear the long-known secret that academic research can be wasteful. Janet Woodcock, who headed up the COVID-19 therapeutics development and Operation Warp Speed, pointed to the lack of useful results from clinical trials during the annual leadership reception of the Friends of Cancer Research4. She mentioned that “only about 6% of all the trial arms that

THE BIG IDEA

are going on will yield actionable data.” She attributed the low percentage to the study designs that are often underpowered, don’t enroll enough people, and may not even be randomized. We believe that there are several different factors that contribute to academia’s challenge to effectively address societal problems and to academia’s propensity to be wasteful with research dollars.

The question we need to urgently ask now is whether just adding more money to a system that has not been able to solve many of our societal ills previously is sufficient to contribute to solving our current pressing societal problems or whether we need to consider, in addition to increased support, changing the model of research, specifically in the way we do promotion and tenure in research universities, and work with and implement solutions in communities.

The Future of Research – Today’s White

House Priorities

The 2022 White House Budget has shifted its federal research priorities to focus on many of the societal challenges arising through the public discourse over the last couple of years. There is infused funding into community health, climate science and the transition to a clean energy future, health disparirities and racial equity, advanced manufacturing, public safety, and technology transfer and innovation.

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Rethinking

R UNET E POLIEC

Merit

THE BIG IDEA

At least in universities, some waste is due to the way faculty value the individual contribution of researchers over collaborative efforts. In the biomedical sciences, for instance, faculty are evaluated for promotion and tenure based on their ability to garner one or more single investigator NIH R01 grants. Darrell Kirch, in his AAMC President’s address during the 2007 Annual Meeting, already questioned this model of research more than a decade ago: “But in a world of increasing research complexity, in which science is more and more interdisciplinary and highly networked, just how well does this model of autonomous investigators work?”5

It is not just the biomedical field where collaborations as a measure of career advancement are discouraged. Many humanities disciplines rely on the single-author book to evaluate faculty for tenure and promotion. A collaboration between humanities researchers with researchers in STEM areas (where the output is research articles in peerreviewed journals) might be incompatible with the requirement to publish a single-author book. Fields that require large collaborations also face their own challenges. As an example, in high-energy physics, hundreds of researchers are needed to carry out massive and very expensive experiments. No single researcher can take credit for themselves without acknowledging the contributions of many other researchers. Birnholtz6 described how this field developed ways to determine contributions and discusses the problems associated with a research environment where large numbers of researchers need to contribute in different ways to the success of an experiment. The need to be noticed is one of the issues, and he points out that “[it] is also quite easy to get lost or even crushed in the crowd of a large HEP collaboration.” Funding agencies have recognized that to solve large and complex problems, collaborations are essential, and these collaborations often need cross-disciplinary boundaries. For instance, the NSF has promoted for some years now convergence research7 as a “means [to solve] vexing research problems, in particular, complex problems focusing on societal needs” and has included it formally in the Ten Big Ideas8 in 2016. Convergence research reflects the realization that technologies alone cannot solve societal problems. It takes a significant commitment of time and effort to establish collaborations across disciplines if they have not traditionally collaborated, and the current merit system discourages this level of investment. Furthermore, if we value being a PI on a grant or first author on a publication more than the actual contributions toward solving a significant societal problem, researchers who want to collaborate start essentially with one hand tied behind their backs.

The promotion and tenure rules are established by the university research community. There are no federal guidelines or mandates that tell a university how the reward system needs to look. The reward system is under the control of the faculty and university administration. If the research community wants to expand the reach of scholarly works to address societal problems more effectively, it needs to start rethinking how this can be accomplished. Changing the merit system and identifying other metrics than authorship, PI status, or being noticed would be a good start to incentivize collaborations across disciplines to address societal needs.

“But in a world of increasing research complexity, in which science is more and more interdisciplinary and highly networked, just how well does this model of autonomous investigators work?” — Darrell Kirch Past President, AAMC

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Rethinking

Community

Another area that needs restructuring is how academia interacts with communities when addressing societal issues. These interactions are even more complex when the expertise of multiple disciplines at one or even multiple universities is required.

Universities have been pejoratively termed ivory towers because they are often thought of as a place where the faculty pursue their own intellectual interests, whether they are focused on practical concerns of everyday life or not. Societal problems cannot be solved by staying in the ivory tower when they affect communities, and without community input, it is doubtful that researchers will even ask the right questions. How researchers involve community members, however, needs to change from the current practice of simply having communities serve as study participants, which rarely gives community members a voice in the design of the research, and even more importantly, rarely any benefit from the insights gained by the research. All too often, the outcome is a research paper in a peer-reviewed journal, and no further contact between the investigator and the study participants occurs. Many societal problems affect underserved communities disproportionally. Building the trust that is needed to involve a community in research would be facilitated if the researchers resembled the community they work in. The lack of diversity in STEM disciplines then becomes an additional barrier, and nonSTEM disciplines that often have more diverse faculty might be better positioned to build relationships with communities. There are good examples of humanities projects, such as the University of Houston’s Puerto Rican Literature Project9, that give underserved communities a voice and serve as a starting point to build trust between communities and academia.

THE BIG IDEA

Rawlings, Flexner, and Riley in “Community-Led Research: Walking New Pathways Together”10 highlight the importance of working closely with communities and listening to their needs before designing a research project. However, following this path may take years of working with the community before research can start, and this is in conflict with the timeline and structure of university promotion and tenure requirements. A community is not a lab where the researcher can come in, do a survey or intervention to get data for another publication, but then leave and never come back. One of the authors, James Flexner, told the Times of Higher Education11 that “[b]efore you go out into the field, you should be [asking] people: ‘What do you want out of this? How can we do this in a way that does no harm and ideally produces benefit?’ And the community gets to define the benefit — not [academics] as outsiders coming in.” If a lot of up-front work is required before the ‘formal’ part of research can commence, Institutional Review Boards may find it difficult to approve the research because of the unknown direction it might take as the community and the research team jointly determine what questions are relevant. This concern could be alleviated through a robust post-approval monitoring system that is already in place for clinical research. It will require careful discussions that are, however, worth the effort if we want to have a positive impact on communities with our research.

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On giving underserved

communities a voice

By Sarah F. Hill

In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones-Shafroth Act that extended Puerto Ricans citizenship in the United States. The first large wave of immigrants from Puerto Rico arrived soon after but were hardly welcomed with open arms by those in the U.S. In fact, they were treated as second-class citizens. Puerto Rican writers have endured colonialist practices, including the linguistic imposition of English that has established monolingualism as the norm. This has kept them from becoming part of the American literary canon. “El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/The Puerto Rican Literature Project” (PRLP) at the University of Houston aims to preserve the voices of Puerto Rican writers by making nearly 50,000 archival and contemporary primary sources available to the general public. This underemphasized demographic has a rich history of prolific works. The executive editor of Arte Público Press (APP) and co-founder of the U.S. Latino Digital Humanities program at UH, Gabriela Baeza Ventura, Ph.D., will lead the project in collaboration with a Colectivo (Collective) of prominent scholars, writers and translators from Puerto Rico and the U.S. diaspora. Baeza Ventura said; “The archival mission is anchored in a deep sensitivity to Puerto Rican linguistic richness, which stands in contrast to the violence of monolingualism that reflects forced histories of migration within the archipelago and abroad.” Once English was imposed as the national language of Puerto Rico, there was little to no space left for writers working in their native Spanish. “While this project is bilingual, the first entrance into the portal will be in Spanish so as to document the importance of the language that Puerto Rican and Latinx writers use to express themselves,” said Baeza Ventura. The 1940s and 1970s saw the majority of the influx of Puerto Rican citizens to America. With a $1.35 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this Colectivo is beginning to unearth treasures in a way not seen before. “In Puerto Rico, in 2021, there is no centralized space (physical or digital) specifically for Puerto Rican literature that spans the archipelago and diaspora. This has made the unification of Puerto Rican literary studies difficult, splitting the field between archipelago and diaspora,” said Baeza Ventura. Each entry in the digital database will be comprehensive and will include things such as the biography of the writer, access to poems in original Spanish and a translation in English, links to other places the poems can be accessed, lesson plans for teaching about these important contributors and even interviews and performances. The Colectivo is already interviewing authors and recording them reading their original work. And as far as who can access the database? “The archive itself will be open-access and have a digital life. The team will follow a post-custodial model where physical archives will remain in the institutions and archives that originally housed them,” said Baeza Ventura. She went on to clarify this delicate situation: “This is not a project that seeks to replace those archives or transfer them outside Puerto Rico or the diasporic institutions where they live. Archival preservation efforts are crucial and digitization efforts are designed to broaden access, not replace preservation work.”

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Rethinking

Knowledge Transfer The final point we want to make is that, as part of rethinking community engagement, we need to rethink knowledge transfer between communities and academia. Universities have made much progress in transferring technology developed by their faculty, staff and students into the marketplace and have realized what it takes to bridge the gap from a proof of concept to producing a prototype that can be moved into a production environment. Proof of concept is too risky for the private sector to take on, yet too advanced for academia to move any further. Technology transfer offices fill the gap and work with both the academic inventor and the private sector to de-risk technologies and get them ready for the market. Commercializing technologies became only financially of value to universities after the Bayh-Dole Act allowed universities to profit from their own inventions. Prior to this, there was little incentive to move research into the marketplace. The federal government has taken other steps to de-risk technologies and provide incentives to develop technologies to get ready for the marketplace, such as the SBIR/STTR programs12. The federal government also funds large institutes that are partnerships among industry, academia, and federal partners in areas of national priorities, such as the 16 manufacturing institutes that are forming “a growing network of advanced manufacturing institutes to increase U.S. manufacturing competitiveness and promote a robust and sustainable national manufacturing R&D infrastructure.”13

There is no analog university office or network of institutes with partnerships among academia, communities, and the federal government to translate community-based research sustainably into communities. Universities have offices of community engagement or outreach that connect with communities but are not set up to support implementation programs at scale and to sustain them in the long run. There are currently no financial incentives, like the Bayh-Dole Act, to build such offices or institutes. To implement interventions at scale will require getting the private sector and government agencies involved. Universities are good at developing pilot projects, doing the research to determine whether interventions are effective, and developing long-term data collection projects to monitor projects. They do not have the capacity to roll out interventions at scale and maintain them. This needs to be done by the private sector and government agencies. Some faculty still have reservations about working closely with the private sector, in particular in the non-STEM areas. To overcome these reservations will require a cultural shift that will take time, but it is necessary to scale up solutions and make them sustainable. Overcoming these reservations is also needed since research doesn’t end with handing the project over to the private sector or government. Researchers need to stay involved as valuable partners to monitor quality and continue to do research on the effectiveness of the intervention. For full set of linked references, visit uh.edu/thebigidea

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THE BIG IDEA

On Research

Informing Policy

By Sarah F. Hill All research is valuable, but research at the University of Houston that informs policy translates to a qualitative improvement in the lives of Houstonians. For instance, Andrew Stearns, a graduate student, used millions of dollars’ worth of commercially collected LiDAR data to study the erosion and deposition of sediment caused by floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey. What he found was that sediment was stranded downstream on drainage banks, such as Buffalo Bayou Park near downtown Houston and in the Houston Ship Channel. His faculty advisor, Julia Wellner, Ph.D., associate professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and he decided to tread lightly. Still, they opted to take the problem to policymakers. In the city of Houston, arguments rage about whether to continue modifying stream flow to move flooding and associated sediments out of neighborhoods. It sounds like a good plan, until the realization that the neighborhoods spared are the richest, and that the poorest will deal with the fallout from subsequent storms. And as if the human aspect was not enough, the budgetary issues that arise are also monumental. “It’s hard to believe that a pile of sand can grow from a single grain to a volume that costs millions of dollars to dredge and remove. It takes a project like this to come in and observe these piles of sand on a citywide scale and say: yes, we are free to straighten or pave channels, but that pile of sand, that sediment, grows especially after large floods and we have to understand the budget implications down the road or, more often, downstream,” said Wellner. Similarly, Sandra Guerra Thompson, J.D., professor of criminal law, translated her research into policy. Entrenched in scandal, errors made in the crime lab in Houston often resulted in the guilty going free and the innocent sitting in prison. “Bad science wreaks havoc,” said Guerra Thompson in her book, “Cops in Lab Coats.” Her research in wrongful convictions led to her appointment to the Board of Directors of Houston’s pioneering forensic laboratory, the Houston Forensic Science Center. Since then, her writings have informed the discussion for crime labs to become independent entities rather than police organizations. She even testified before a Congressional committee to that end. Now, the Houston Forensic Science Center is a world leader in quality control. The change came too late for individuals like Houstonian George Rodriguez who was wrongfully convicted of rape and served 18 years. But going forward, the Houston Forensic Science Center will continue to advocate for good science and remain an independent public agency, serving as a model of integrity favoring neither law enforcement nor criminals, but rather blind justice.

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PERSPECTIVES

Checking Our

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THE BIG IDEA

Finding equitable approaches to support impactful research, a Q&A with: EZEMENARI OBASI, PH.D. Director of the HEALTH Research Institute; Associate Vice President for Research Administration, University of Houston

ALEXIS STOKES

Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

LINDSAY LEWIS

Executive Director of Strategic Research Communications University of Houston

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To say the year 2020 was when we all “came online” would be an understatement. It was a year of social isolation but also one of social awakening. A largescale shift in the cultural conversation sparked by the murder of George Floyd, and the protests in response, prompted universities to prioritize funding for research projects focused on racial equity and social impact. While those projects take due time to come to fruition, universities are dealing with questions about equitable representation and visibility for underrepresented faculty in real time. Here we gather perspectives on how we can address our blind spots to better support all of the research happening across the enterprise. Especially in response to the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, universities have started to focus on connecting better with underrepresented faculty. Are there helpful insights you can give about increasing trust and authentic communication between faculty and administration? Stokes: The institution is older than all of us. It’s not an overnight process to change that culture. It’s important for us all to acknowledge that if we don’t commit to the investment of time, energy and money it takes to achieve this kind of change, then what we know will happen is that it will continue to cost those with marginalized identities. It’ll cost them emotional labor. It’ll cost them also in their research because that emotional labor takes a toll. We know on the faculty side of things that means that you are disproportionately providing informal services to the university, and that work is not being taken into consideration when you go for promotion. It will cost you one way or the other, but sometimes just posing the question — “How does this align with our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion goals?”— can push the discussion forward and start to unearth where the inequities are. Obasi: To some degree, you have to just walk into places. When we do community work in the health equity space, we don’t go and say “let’s just talk to the leader” because we don’t know if that person’s the true voice of that particular community. University administrators could join department meetings, meet faculty where they are, and not rely on stories or achievements to filter down to them. There’s going to be bias brought into that, and you might miss some very important stories. Or, communicators could put out requests to the effect of, “We want to cover story x, is there anyone at the university that’s doing work in this area?” This allows the faculty to reach out to you. Faculty may not even know that the university is interested in covering a topic or moving forward in a certain focus area.

THE BIG IDEA

Sometimes just posing the question — “How does this align with our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion goals?” — can push the discussion forward. We tend to think of faculty visibility in terms of high-dollar funding from major federal sources or publication within a handful of the most prestigious journals. What kind of blind spots does this create and what other criteria might we consider when identifying and supporting impactful faculty work to make better strides toward inclusivity? Obasi: Grants and publications show an impact in the scientific community. If you care about your engagement in local communities, then those indicators may not be the best benchmarks. Faculty might volunteer their time and make impacts through community activities that truly change lives, and there could be no grant dollars attached to that. On the other hand, projects with large federal grants may not necessarily translate so that the community could benefit from them. An approach where we balance scientific impact with community engagement impact keeps us away from blind thresholds. That way we can demonstrate that we’re moving the needle in domains that are meaningful to the people that we serve. Lewis: In communications, we are trained to think in terms of news and press releases, but our team has taken a different approach. One of the drivers behind our Research Reaching Houston project is the fact that we have all these great stories that may be told once, but then they are forgotten about. People forget. We forget as a university. So we built a website where we present stories in a reader-friendly format, focusing on the impact regardless of the funding or what department it comes from. Of course, this project has its own blind spots. We’re not covering all research projects, just those with direct impact on our city. But by changing our focus, we’ve covered a lot of stories that were never going to be told otherwise. We know this because faculty are telling us, “Nobody’s ever called me to talk about my research.”

Faculty are telling us, “Nobody’s ever called me to talk about my research.” As you each navigate between the worlds of faculty, administration and the public, are there ways you see that universities can be more active and effective in supporting faculty and enhancing representation within the research enterprise? Are there critical gaps we need to fill?

Stokes: Sitting within the school of engineering in a STEM context, it’s common now for our students to do a postdoc before going on to faculty positions. Taking that into consideration, we are having discussions about these issues with our postdocs. They are the next generation of faculty members. When they sit on a journal editing board or when they are writing grants, we want them to be mindful of their own biases and not end up contributing to the lack of representation within academia. We have a responsibility as the institution that hired those postdocs to set expectations around what it means to be a faculty member. Obasi: As a faculty member, you’re not trained to think about how to publicize your work, you’re trained to just write research papers, present at professional meetings and try to get grants. And there’s a translational gap in science in general. Faculty may not know about media training and other opportunities, or that they even have the capacity to move the needle on some of these things on their own. But it takes an investment of time and resources to train faculty to write op-eds and prepare for media interviews so that they’re invited again. I think that if we put that work in on the front end, we would actually get more national coverage. Training faculty to be their own individual machine of publicizing their work beyond the traditional academic platforms would go a long way. Lewis: There is a lot of scholarly activity at the university that is very significant to our peer institutions but may not make a big splash with the public. It’s still important for us to promote it within our academic community to really make our University stand out to other universities as a growing enterprise. It positions us as strong collaborators, which is important for fostering convergence research. Another blind spot within universities is innovation. It’s not well understood by everybody, but it’s a very productive and profitable piece of the current and future research enterprise. Those stories are trailing, and there’s a lot more we can do to promote technologies that have transferred to society or companies that have spun out of academia into industry. We need to continue to open avenues to tell these stories.

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DISCUSSION BOARD

The Acceleration of Innovation

THE PANDEMIC’S EFFECT ON STARTUP INCUBATORS By Cory Thaxton When the world came to a halt in 2020 due to COVID-19, innovation moved forward as normal day to day operations went virtual. Small business incubators like the University of Houston Technology Bridge, The Cannon and The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, have found that, even during a pandemic, new innovations and leading-edge technologies have become easier to create.

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THE BIG IDEA

“Hardship always leads to innovation. People have to get scrappy and creative. There’s always a lot of good that comes from the bad,” founder and president of The Cannon, Lawson Gow, said.

After the lockdown went into effect, just about everything went virtual. At this point social distancing wasn’t even an option unless you were going to the doctor’s office or the grocery store.

Small business incubators provide a wide variety of crucial resources that startups, entrepreneurs, investors and corporate innovators need to succeed.

As organizations that were made to help and support small businesses, it was important that incubators remained connected to their communities and communicate with them even in a virtual world.

What did these incubators do to continue to help push their communities toward success when the lockdown went into effect? The very first thing The Cannon did was set up a 24-hour hotline that businesses could call if they needed help with anything. “The Cannon Emergency Response Team emerged from these efforts and was on the front lines of doing whatever we could to help people survive and get back on track,” Gow said. He also said that it was hard to see hundreds of businesses struggling at the beginning of the pandemic. Kerri Smith, the associate managing director of The Rice Alliance said, as an organization built on forging connections that accelerate startup success, The Rice Alliance knew that staying afloat and continuing to offer their programs were crucial aspects of their important work.

“We provided intentional and comprehensive updates on resources, events and community opportunities through email outreach and social media, and featured success stories of entrepreneurs who participated in our programs,” Smith said. Through The Cannon’s CERT program, they stayed extremely connected to their community and even built an entire digital platform called Cannon Connect that served and continues to serve their virtual community. “It’s our own internal LinkedIn for Cannon members inside and outside Cannon spaces. It has educational curriculum, a job board, an equity crowdfunding site, and much more,” Gow said. Gow said Cannon Connect will be the “lasting legacy of the COVID era.”

“Within a matter of weeks, we organized and hosted our first virtual pitch event for startups innovating in the energy sector. Originally slated to be held at the Offshore Technology Conference but then cancelled, The Rice Alliance Energy Tech Venture Day portion of the OTC event provided a great platform for our startups to get exposure,” Smith said. The University of Houston Technology Bridge began to connect businesses to the Small Business Development Center, where they could get help with all their preliminary operational tasks. Also, the SBDC helped businesses access the COVID-related funding that the government was offering. “That seemed to help some of them get through some of the challenging times early on in the pandemic,” said Chris Taylor, executive director of the UH Office of Technology Transfer and Innovation.

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“It’s only grown post-COVID and is increasingly packed with entrepreneurs, investors and mentors who connect and collaborate throughout Houston and even now beyond Houston,” he said. The Rice Alliance didn’t create any new stand-alone programs during the pandemic, but they did begin to offer more options for international engagement than normal “to address the changing nature of how [they] were working.” For example, as the administrative host of the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, The Rice Alliance worked with GCEC Leadership to begin hosting monthly virtual connections webinars to engage members on entrepreneurial topics. They also increased the number of pitch practices before the 2021 Rice Business Plan Competition to provide startup teams with additional pitch prep. “The virtual platform made it much easier,” Smith said. Even though the pandemic made it harder for face-to-face interactions and forced daily operations online, small business incubators saw an opportunity to grow their communities by bringing in new non-local investors, entrepreneurs, mentors and startups.

“Before the pandemic, most people conducted a lot of stuff face to face and it takes time to travel and set things up so the pace of meetings was more spread out. What you see now is the pace of innovation skyrocketing because I could have a Zoom meeting today with some action items and rather than having to book travel or schedule a meeting three weeks from now, I may be able to get back in touch with them in four days,” Taylor said. Startup development organizations like The Cannon, The Rice Alliance and the UH Technology Bridge are excited for what’s next as the world slowly gets back to normal, and they are grateful for what they were able to accomplish during lockdown. Gow is most excited about now being able to connect with entrepreneurs everywhere, no matter their physical location. “It’s enabling a true democratization of resources that aren’t just concentrated in big startup hubs like Silicon Valley, but can be accessed anywhere,” Gow said.

“The biggest opportunity was reducing the need for entrepreneurs to travel, which exponentially increased remote engagement,” Smith said.

The Cannon is working hard to open more locations where the company believes they are needed. There are three currently under construction. They want to develop a creative workspace that startups could work out of and be surrounded by a packed calendar of events, classes, speakers, mentors, networking, investors and more.

They saw an increase in participants for their events, which also provided increased access to subject matter experts and mentoring resources.

During the pandemic, The Rice Alliance organized and deployed Houston’s first clean energy accelerator to support early-stage, clean energy startups.

“This was definitely apparent as we launched our first partnership between the McFerrin Center for Entrepreneurship at Texas A&M University and OwlSpark Accelerator. The lockdown actually made it easier for Aggie startup teams and Aggie mentors to participate in the accelerator since all of the programming was delivered virtually. This included speakers and mentors from all corners of the world,” Smith said.

“The Rice Alliance Clean Energy Accelerator was launched to better position early-stage startups that are advancing solutions for a cleaner, more efficient and sustainable future. The 12-week program prepares entrepreneurs to accelerate their business, launch demonstration projects, connect with customers and fundraise,” Smith said.

At The Cannon, entrepreneurs can join their community from anywhere in the world on Cannon Connect and tap into their support infrastructure. Both The Cannon and The Rice Alliance provided examples of how the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting lockdown, improved engagement and therefore advanced the speed of innovation. Smith said the lockdown practically forced startups to speed up their innovations, but not in a negative way. According to Gow, many companies died but even more figured out how to achieve things “faster, better or cheaper because they had to.”

THE BIG IDEA

Thousands of local entrepreneurs and companies rely on the resources of small business incubators, and not even COVID could stop them from pushing Houston’s startup economy forward. As the pandemic persists, it will continue to compress the timeline of innovation, not only benefiting small business incubators but also the businesses they support.

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CONTEMPLATIONS

A Remarkable Government Investment BY JOHN LIENHARD John Lienhard is a retired professor emeritus of mechanical engineering and history at the University of Houston. He’s the founding author and voice of the nationally-aired radio program, “The Engines of our Ingenuity.” www.uh.edu/engines

The PWA — the Public Works Administration — was, according to my father, a terrible exercise in government waste. Given the choice between creating soup kitchens and jobs during the Great Depression, the “New Deal” opted for a huge public works program, paid for by new taxes. So, while my father cursed, Washington created lowpaying jobs for everyone from laborers to poets and artists. Now I read a richly illustrated old book about PWA works built by 1939, and I am astonished. I had no idea how much we’d bought with a mere two billion dollars, or how those dollars shaped America. This 700-page sampling of PWA works reads like my personal scrapbook. Here’s Hoover Dam, which I first saw on my honeymoon; the University of Utah Library, where I spent the spring of 1981; the St. Louis Municipal Auditorium, where my wife played violin; Bonneville Dam and the Oregon State Capital which I’ve often visited; the Lincoln Tunnel and our own San Jacinto Monument. And that’s just the big stuff. Here are small bridges and Staten Island Ferry boats — post offices and sewage disposal plants — reform schools and airplane hangars. Not to mention so many public works of art. The PWA built the music buildings at Indiana University and Denton, Texas. They grew into two fine American music schools.

But let us spend a day and a night in one particular building: Timberline Lodge. You may remember its exterior in the horror movie, The Shining. Timberline Lodge, built upon great hewn logs, lies high up the side of Mt. Hood in Oregon. The inside smells of wood and warmth. Everywhere, throughout its balconies and halls are works of art — paintings, wood bas-relief, and statuary. Spend a day and a night there, and we begin to understand the pain, then recovery from, the Great Depression. Interior secretary Harold Ickes ran the old PWA, and he ran it well. They called him “Honest Harold” for his trouble. Yet I do not scoff at my father’s concern. Too much government spending has been managed by lesser folk than Harold Ickes. But for a season, the government got into the business of making jobs and building America. Now, as I read this astonishing old book, I see that they did a far better job of it than I’d realized. A lifetime later, these are the structures — both great and small — that still define the America we all know. Short, C.W., and Stanley-Brown, R., Public Buildings: A Survey of Architecture of Projects Constructed by Federal and Other Governmental Bodies Between the Years 1933 and 1939 with the Assistance of the Public Works Administration. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1939. For many snippets of PWA (and the smaller WPA which followed it) art, literature, and architecture on the web, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration

NON - PROFIT ORG. U.S . P O STAG E

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H O U S TO N , T E X A S P E R M I T N O . 5 9 10

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