On the Role of Disciplinary Organizational Units in a Multidisciplinary Campus

An underlying assumption of this strategic focusing initiative seems to be that faculty lines are best planned in the context of creating specific applied themes instead of in the context of building strong, well-balanced disciplinary units.  Although much important and influential research occurs through multi-disciplinary collaborations, this does not mean that the best strategy for creating and nurturing the building blocks of such research is to recruit faculty into collaboration themes.  Instead, disciplinary units play a critical role in providing a long-lasting, enriching, and collegial environment in which faculty can build their research careers and train their students.  Disciplinary units have the expertise to recruit, evaluate, and nurture faculty that build and complement the program’s current strengths.  Moreover, the top faculty candidates will be looking to join programs with disciplinary units that they (and their advisers) recognize will best support their careers.  A hiring process that emphasizes bringing expertise into a specific research theme may not attract or select the most talented researchers, which is why virtually all research institutions are organized to recruit talent into disciplines, even if the researchers spend their time in cross-disciplinary research groups.

Another issue is that the functioning of UC Merced as a true university that fulfills its missions in research, teaching, and service will require effective administrative units below the level of schools.  These units are almost universally disciplinary departments, and a process that largely removes such units from faculty planning will greatly undermine the ability of these units to ensure courses are taught, students graduated, faculty promoted, and so on.  Any proposal to radically change this planning process should identify what administrative structures will be created to ensure these roles are fulfilled.  Finally, it is understandable why it is tempting for the campus to invest in a few select areas that may quickly gain recognition; however, the responsibility given to us in starting UC Merced was not to build a research center with a few pillars of excellence, but rather to create a university that will last for centuries and has the breadth and eventual depth to excel in research domains as yet unknown.  Building a university requires the patience to build strong foundations across the many disciplines of human knowledge, a process that will take a long time, as it has at every university, including the world's top private universities and our sister campuses in the UC system.

Definition of Thematic Area

Chemistry is the science of the composition, properties, and transformations of matter.  Since its earliest roots in antiquity, chemical research has spanned the range from purely theoretical investigations of the nature of matter to very practical application of this knowledge to improve the human condition.  To this day chemistry retains this role as "the central science" translating fundamental physics and mathematical knowledge to practical applications in biology, medicine, and materials science, as well as industrial processes and products.  Because of this role as the link between many disciplines of science and engineering, a strong chemistry program is a critical part of a successful research university.  This central role became evident in Round 1 of the Strategic Academic Focusing process when the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Proposal was linked to five of the nine campus research themes: Human Health, Energy and Energy Systems, Information, Computational, and Data Sciences, and Engineering, Matter Science and Engineering, and Life Science.  In all of these areas, chemistry provides essential collaborative capabilities in measurement, synthesis, and simulation.  Indeed, a significant fraction of journal papers from UC Merced chemists involve collaborations with other disciplines and many large research grants to UC Merced involve multidisciplinary teams including chemists.  In addition to its role as a linking competency for research, chemistry courses provide a core part of all technical majors; 100% of all science and engineering majors at UC Merced take at least one chemistry course.

Intellectual Components of Strategic Initiative

Although chemistry is inherently a very broad discipline, there are a handful of common "grand challenge goals" that encompass most of the current research in chemistry.  These are:

1) Atomic-level control of molecular structures and chemical reactions

2) Single molecule measurements and manipulation

3) Computer simulations of chemical processes at "predictive accuracy"

4) Design and synthesis of materials with pre-specified properties

5) A chemical understanding of the machinery of life.

Together, these goals promise solutions to many of the challenges of the modern world, from discovering new medicines for emerging diseases, creating more efficient processes for food production, developing new energy sources, to inventing more environmentally friendly materials and industrial processes.

Faculty Participation

At present the UC Merced Chemistry and Chemical Biology (CCB) Bylaw 55 unit includes 12 ladder rank research faculty and one Lecturer with Potential Security of Employment.  The CCB Graduate Group was approved last year as a stand-alone graduate program by the system wide Coordinating Committee on Graduate Affairs, and includes all of the CCB unit faculty and two additional faculty who are part of the Molecular and Cell Biology Bylaw 55 unit.  The CCB faculty span most of the major subfields of chemistry including 4 faculty whose research is in theoretical and computational chemistry, an unusually high fraction of non-experimental faculty compared to most other chemistry programs.

The productivity of a chemistry research program is measured by its publications in the top-rated chemistry journals.  Since 2012, CCB faculty have published articles in Nano Letters, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Nature Chemistry, Journal of Chemical Physics, Journal of Physical Chemistry, ACS Nano, and Angewandte Chemie, all high-impact-factor journals that are read by a wide cross-section of the chemistry community.  This recognition builds the reputation of both the chemistry program and UC Merced as a whole.  The ability to produce such high-impact publications depends upon sustained funding, which in chemistry is primarily from extramural grants from federal agencies.  CCB faculty have established a strong track record getting numerous grants from the NSF, NIH, Petroleum Research Fund, Dept. of Energy, US Air Force, Army, and UCOP Lab Fees program.

The chemistry undergraduate major at UC Merced has had very robust growth, quadrupling in size over the past five years to 238 in fall 2013.  The CCB graduate program has grown more slowly, to 19 graduate students in fall 2013, limited primarily by challenges in a very small program attracting sufficient qualified applicants.  So far the 2014 graduate recruiting has been going well, with 7 new doctoral students joining the CCB graduate group.

Distinctiveness

Chemistry is an inherently multidisciplinary science, so to create competitive research and educational programs will require strength in all primary subfields of physical, organic, inorganic, theoretical and biological chemistry, and across the underpinning capabilities of synthesis, measurement and simulation.  A program that lacked any of these components would not be able to support the types of multidisciplinary research that are meant to be UC Merced's hallmark, nor would such a program be able to sustain accredited undergraduate degrees or graduate programs able to attract top students or training grants. 

Although it is not productive to create a chemistry program that is unique simply by narrowing its focus to exclude subdisciplines of chemistry, many excellent chemistry programs do have special features that distinguish them from other programs.  For example, CCB is notable in the number of its publications and grants that span disciplines.  Nearly all CCB faculty have published papers with faculty in other units in SNS or other schools.  These collaborations have led to high profile publications with UC Merced faculty in biology, materials science, computer science, physics, applied math, and mechanical engineering, as well as several large collaborative research grants.

Another distinguishing feature is that CCB is a very modern chemistry program in that nearly all faculty do research focused on the four grand challenges of chemistry described at earlier in this proposal, taking advantage of particular strengths in theoretical/computational chemistry and nanoscience.  A large fraction of the CCB faculty use computational or mathematical modeling as a central element of their research.  While not creating a radically different type of chemistry program—which may end up as an unsuccessful gimmick—these features of CCB are recognized as distinct and should provide recruiting opportunities for faculty and graduate students interested in multidisciplinary, prediction-based, chemical research.

To help determine the size and disciplinary make up of successful university chemistry programs that are recognized for their contributions to chemical research and provide effective teaching for its majors and service courses, we referred to the US News rankings of the best chemistry graduate programs (most recent version is 2010) that lists nearly 200 chemistry graduate programs (http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/...) and the 2010 Assessment of Research Doctorate Programs from the National Research Council that includes 147 programs  (http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/Resdoc/).  In this analysis we focused on programs tagged as simply "Chemistry" to exclude some very large hybrid chemistry-life sciences programs.

Across the US, chemistry programs listed in these sources range in size from 8 to 174 faculty, with an average (from the NRC report) of 36 faculty.  These numbers vary to some extent with the size of the university, but it is notable that there are a number of strong to excellent chemistry programs with faculty sizes around 20-24, a size reasonably achievable for UC Merced by 2020.  An "aspirational peer" could be the chemistry department at Johns Hopkins University which is ranked as 21st in the nation despite having only 22 faculty (numbers from http://www.chemistry.jhu.edu/).  Clearly the program at Johns Hopkins benefits from being located at a top ranked university (12th among national universities in the 2013 US News ranking) and from being a wealthy private university.  Another clear advantage of this program is excellent research space including a recently renovated 44,000 sq. ft. chemistry building, providing about 2,000 sq. ft. of office and lab space for each faculty member.  Each faculty member has, on average, 5 graduate students for an overall program size of 120 students.  Another high quality, modest-sized chemistry department is at Emory University, which has only 24 chemistry faculty and yet is ranked 38th amongst chemistry programs and supports over 120 graduate students.  Like Johns Hopkins, Emory is a top ranked university (20th in the UC News rankings) with superb chemistry research facilities including two laboratory buildings. 

There are programs at less elite institutions that rank relatively high in national rankings despite their small size.  These include one public university, the University of Illinois at Chicago which ranks 67th in chemistry programs (tied with several other programs) with 24 faculty and over 140 graduate students.  Two other programs achieved good rankings with a small faculty and graduate program, including Brandeis, ranked 67th with 21 faculty and 45 graduate students, and Northeastern, ranked 90th with 27 faculty and 54 graduate students. 

It is important to note that despite their small size, all of the chemistry programs cited above have faculty covering all of the major subfields of chemistry, indicating the need for disciplinary breadth even in small chemistry programs.

CCB Planned Program Growth to 2020

Our aim is to grow the faculty of CCB to reach 21 faculty by 2020.  This will involve a net gain of 9 research faculty.  Based on the example of our exemplar schools, this number of faculty would constitute a "critical mass" of faculty for our research and graduate programs.  Using the projected growth in the number of chemistry majors and service teaching load, 21 faculty would lead to a 16.5/1 student-faculty ratio for chemistry majors and an 18.0/1 ratio for service teaching student FTEs to faculty. 

A major aim of CCB over the next several years is to grow the graduate student per faculty ratio from the current value of 1.6 graduate students per CCB faculty to 3.0 by 2020, leading to a total CCB graduate population of 63 students in 2020.  (Note that a number of students supervised by CCB faculty are in other graduate groups, so the actual graduate student/faculty ratio among CCB faculty is higher than 1.6).  Assuming an average of 5 years to complete a Ph.D., our proposed growth rate will require ramping up our graduate recruiting to about 12 students per year, compared to the 7 recruited for fall 2014.  This goal of 3 graduate students per faculty is nearly 50% lower than most of our top rated exemplar schools, but above peer schools like Brandeis and UI, Chicago. 

With the success of CCB faculty in grant funding to support GRAs and the large number of chemistry TAships, student funding is not a primary limitation in growing the CCB graduate program.  The biggest challenge to date has been the small size and short history of the program that has limited its visibility to qualified students.  The continued growth of the CCB faculty, recognition through our publications, and the word-of-mouth advertising by our graduate program alumni will inevitably boost our applicant pool and the size of our program.

Resources Needed to Achieve our 2020 Goals

The primary resource limitation to our proposed growth plan is laboratory space for new faculty.  Assuming that CCB moves towards a 40% fraction of theoretical/computational chemists—which would be very high compared to other chemistry programs—we will need at least 6 new chemical laboratories for new faculty hires.  These will most likely be "wet labs" including a minimum of 600 sq. ft. each, for a total of nearly 4000 sq. ft. of laboratory space.  This exceeds by 4-5 laboratories the space currently assigned to CCB faculty in SE1 or SE2, once we factor in the move of two CCB faculty to campus from Castle.  Therefore, we would need a larger allocation of space in the existing buildings or space in new laboratory buildings.  Alternatively, the CCB faculty is willing to explore plans to renovate laboratory space at Castle to make it suitable for thematic groups of CCB researchers.  However, such a plan would be contingent on sufficient institutional funding to support the additional costs and support services needed to perform research offsite from the main campus.

In addition to the laboratory space needs, the CCB hiring plan requires startup funding for at least ten new faculty (including start up needed for the replacement hire for a faculty member leaving in summer 2014).  As is true in nearly all fields of science and engineering, sufficient startup funding is essential to a successful hire and, more importantly, successfully starting the career of new faculty member.  Competitive offers in experimental chemistry require startup funding of $600-800K and for theoretical/computational chemistry startup of $300-500K.  Finally, to be a modern, competitive research program, CCB will need to continue to build its shared research infra-structure, including instrumentation such as high-field NMR.