Campus.News: Features

Institute Provost Bud Peterson says among his most important goals for the coming year is to attract, develop, and retain the highest quality faculty possible.

“Building a high-quality faculty and creating a community of scholars are absolutely critical to achieving the goals outlined in The Rensselaer Plan,” Peterson said.

These goals—along with efforts to enhance the first-year experience for faculty, staff, and students, and to ensure a geographic, gender, and ethnic diversity that reflects the global marketplace—are key components outlined in the Performance Plan for the Office of the Provost.

“We want to ensure that new community members develop positive feelings for Rensselaer from the outset,” Peterson says.

Tours of the Troy area and an introduction to the Institute’s award-winning studio teaching methods are designed to acclimate faculty both on and off campus. Additionally, increased assistance for faculty in things such as graduate student tuition cost sharing, grant writing, and guidance on obtaining federal and corporate research support have been cited as key motivators in that critical first year.

With more than 100 people in attendance, the Colloquium on Teaching and Learning in May was the first in a series devoted to continual faculty development. Faculty experts and speakers from several institutions conducted workshops illustrating the latest research, learning styles, and technological teaching tools. Additionally, 28 Curriculum Innovation Grants of approximately $10,000 each were awarded to faculty earlier this summer to promote the development of new teaching methods and techniques.

Peterson says he expects to strengthen and grow the graduate program by recreating the Office of the Dean of the Graduate School—an internal search is currently under way for a dean. Additionally, tuition cost sharing on graduate research projects, particularly those that demonstrate viable multidisciplinary research, has been significantly enhanced.

“We can lessen the financial burden to a particular grant or contract and thereby increase the number and/or quality of the graduate students involved on a particular project in this way,” he says. “That, coupled with our outstanding faculty and ever-growing facilities, makes it easier to attract the type of high-quality research we are seeking.”

In keeping with the ambitious goals outlined in The Rensselaer Plan, the manner in which finances are handled at Rensselaer is undergoing revolutionary changes.

“We are transforming the budgeting process so it aligns with the executive Performance Plans. The President has advocated a different, novel way for an institution to execute its strategies,” said Virginia C. Gregg, vice president for finance.

No longer will school and departmental budgets be based on historical, revenue-based models focusing on assets and nonsalary dollars. Instead, the budgetary focus has shifted to objectives—a shift that represents a first-year highest priority for the finance portfolio. “This linkage heightens the likelihood of success. You think about objectives first, then in terms of resources required to achieve them,” Gregg said.

Gregg described the new approach as “very different. It is strategic rather than tactical. It gives a very disciplined focus to strategic plan execution.” In an approach known as “activity-based costing,” costs are tracked based on objectives, and budgets measure financial performance.

In light of Rensselaer’s plans to construct a biotechnology and interdisciplinary studies center, and an electronic arts and performing arts center, the finance portfolio must develop innovative strategies to fund these projects. Another goal is to increase Rensselaer’s endowment, by way of campaign gifts and strategic investments, so that endowment spending can support 20 percent or more of the budget.

Also, the finance portfolio seeks to improve research administration and fully automate the flow of financial information.

“Timely, accurate, and relevant financial information processing and dissemination are an integral part of information management and will be addressed by the implementation of a data warehouse,” Gregg said. The data warehouse will permit the finance staff to retrieve a wide range of financial information from a single source.

Overall, implementation of the Performance Plans for finance at Rensselaer means more central planning and more accountability, Gregg said.

Rounds gathered the public comments after a review of plans to build a center for electronic media and performing arts, a center for biotechnology and interdisciplinary studies, a 500-car parking garage, and a boiler plant. Rounds also outlined plans for the use of shuttle buses to accommodate faculty, staff, and students who may need to park near the Houston Field House during and after construction.

The public meeting augmented an official “scoping session” held by the city Planning Commission July 12 to provide citizen input on the extent of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to be completed by Rensselaer as part of a State Environmental Quality Review (SEQR).

Rensselaer will now file a draft EIS with the Planning Commission, listing all impacts on such areas as air quality, public safety, aesthetics, traffic, and neighborhood character. The draft EIS will also describe how each impact will be mitigated.

A 30-day public comment period will follow the commission’s acceptance of the draft EIS. That period is expected to run from Aug. 9 through Sept. 10 with a public hearing at City Hall on August 30. Copies of the draft EIS will be available for review at City Hall, Troy Public Library, and Folsom Library. Following the public comment period, the Institute will prepare a final EIS.

“These public meetings and hearings are vitally important,” said Rounds. “It is essential that all of our neighbors and all members of the campus community fully understand what is being proposed and have the opportunity to share their ideas, questions, and concerns.”

The Biotechnology Constellation Search Committee has visited major centers of excellence in biotechnology on the West Coast, meeting with colleagues and publicizing Rensselaer’s search for outstanding researchers in the growing field of biotechnology.

The committee, chaired by Georges Belfort, professor of chemical engineering, spent July 15-20 visiting universities and research facilities in California and Washington. Accompanying Belfort were Robert Spilker, professor and chair of biomedical engineering; Michael Zuker, professor of applied mathematics and biology; and Jonathan Dordick, professor and chair of chemical engineering, who joined the group at Caltech only.

Accompanying the search committee as an external consultant was Marlene Belfort, director of the Division of Genetic Disorders and professor of molecular genetics at the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health.

Stops on the trip included the California Institute of Technology, the University of California at San Francisco, Stanford University, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, and the University of Washington.

“The purpose of the trip,” Georges Belfort said, “was to obtain advice and suggestions for our search, to let others know we are involved in a serious and major biotechnology search, and finally to tell others our plans for the search and the major development at Rensselaer with respect to biotechnology.”

The LRC study has recently been featured in USA Today and on the NBC Nightly News.

Based on field experiments in which drivers responded to objects in their field of vision, LRC researchers concluded that drivers using HIDs were better at “detecting edge-of-roadway hazards, such as pedestrians and animals."

Nanotechnology offers enormous scientific promise to transform the world with better medicines and drug delivery, stronger materials, and faster computer chips. Now an interdisciplinary team of researchers in the new Rensselaer Nanotechnology Center is examining what the new technology will do to the socioeconomic fabric of day-to-day life.

New technologies present opportunities and challenges for organizations. The development of nanotechnology as the latest megatrend in science and engineering will bring a wave of radical innovation, says group leader Lois Peters, associate professor and director of the Lally School of management Ph.D. program. She also is one of the six Rensselaer authors of Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts (Harvard Business School Press).

“We need to be concerned with developing business models from breakthrough research that are aligned with societal values and goals,” Peters says. “There is more to nanotechnology than just making a profit. Major societal benefits as well as dangers must be considered.”

For example, extraordinarily small biosensors could be used as weapons as well aids in pollution control, disease diagnosis, and therapies. “Nanorobots” or drug delivery systems could go out of control and cause more damage than the cancer they are aimed at getting rid of, Peters explains.

Nanotechnology uses molecules and atoms to make nanometer-size (billionth of a meter) building blocks for new materials. Called “nanophase” materials, they comprise particles much smaller than those found in ordinary substances and have different properties from standard metals and ceramics and, therefore, can be used for many new applications.

Peters’ research team will focus on answering questions, such as: How do we prepare for developments in nanotechnology? What steps need to be taken to educate the work force? What management practices are required for nanotechnology to reach its full potential?

“Consideration of these questions will impact how we train and educate students, and will determine who will be the new corporate winners,” Peters says.

Research on Adhesion Energy Leads to Less Expensive Drugs

Researchers at Rensselaer have solved a more than 100-year-old mystery, allowing them to measure the true contact angle of a known liquid placed on a rough solid substrate. This breakthrough, which will let researchers choose better protein filtration membranes, is a major step in making less expensive drugs.

Mechanical and engineering professor Georges Belfort, visiting scientist Masahide Taniguchi from Toray Company in Japan, and graduate student John Pieracci used an atomic force microscope to accurately measure the dips and troughs in a surface. They then applied the results to a simple mathematical model of the surface to obtain the correct or “true” contact angle.

Since the 19th century, energy of adhesion (the energy associated with the “stickiness” between two different phases) between a known drop of liquid and a smooth surface could be determined by measuring the angle between the contact line of a drop and a solid surface. For example, on a newly waxed surface, water drops bead up because they do not like to adhere to wax. Thus, they exhibit low energy of adhesion.

However, since most surfaces are not perfectly smooth, the measured contact angle is not an accurate measure of adhesion, which until now made it difficult to identify the underlying surface energy at hand, explained Belfort.

Their work is published in the July 10 issue of Langmuir, a journal of the American Chemical Society.