photo by: Courtesy: KU Alumni Association/Dan Storey

KU Vaccine Analytics & Formulation Center staff member Kaushal Jerajani, graduate research assistant, works in the lab to formulate and analyze vaccine candidates.

You couldn’t blame the world of scientific researchers if the only thing its members wanted to do was talk about what just happened.

After all, they’ve got a pretty good claim that they just produced one of the greatest scientific achievements in all of history. A lightning-quick development of vaccines has saved millions of lives from COVID-19, and it was researchers — including Barney Graham who did his medical school work at the University of Kansas — who discovered the science and developed the life-changing formulations.

Indeed, research leaders at KU are still talking about vaccines, but not so much the Pfizer, Moderna or even Johnson & Johnson varieties. That’s the past, and researchers would much rather focus on the future.

At KU, that may well mean the next COVID-19 vaccine — the cheap and easy one.

“The vaccines we have for COVID today are fantastic,” said Simon Atkinson, KU’s vice chancellor for research. “But they are expensive and relatively hard to distribute. In the long term that is probably not a sustainable model for vaccines for COVID.”

In other words, somebody had better make a new one. To Atkinson’s way of thinking, that somebody might as well be a KU researcher. The university thinks it has a good candidate in pharmaceutical chemist David Volkin and his team at the Vaccine Analytics and Formulation Center on KU’s West Campus in Lawrence.

“The institute is really looking at ways to develop vaccines that are more stable and easier to produce and more inexpensive, especially for parts of the world where you can’t easily store things at minus 80 degrees,” Atkinson said, referring to the extreme temperatures at which some vaccines must be kept.

Think of that: The next great vaccine is developed at the University of Kansas. If the University of Florida decades ago gained fame and fortune for inventing Gatorade, just imagine what a world-changing vaccine could do for KU.

Granted, football coaches likely wouldn’t have coolers of vaccine dumped on them anytime soon, but it still would be a big deal.

A big deal, but not a certain deal. That’s why KU is not putting all its eggs in that exciting vaccine basket. Instead, KU leaders are actively searching for what the next big deal in the world of KU research will be.

KU leaders are searching in a way that recognizes a certain attribute of big deals: They often are something you haven’t thought of yet. But Atkinson and others have a solution for that.

“We have an incredible brain trust here, so we thought the best way forward was to to ask people what they could do if they had the money,” Atkinson said.

Researchers and faculty members across the university are now doing that thinking. It is part of a formal process called Research Rising. Faculty members have been asked to put together white papers outlining an idea for a new emerging research area that would make sense at KU. The first drafts of proposals are due to Atkinson and his staff in early December.

By the summer, KU hopes to have settled on four projects, which all would be based at KU’s Lawrence or Edwards campuses, rather than the KU Medical Center. Those four projects then would be awarded shares of approximately $12 million in funding that the KU Endowment Association has provided for the Research Rising initiative. KU may also provide additional money from its own funds.

The plan is for the $12 million in seed money to get the research projects through the first five years of existence. By then, the expectation is the research projects will be on the way to being nationally recognized centers or institutes that are attracting significant amounts of grant funding.

In fact, KU leaders are pretty blunt about an underlying goal of this Research Rising initiative.

“The honest truth is that Research Rising is not a program that’s been crafted to support all the research at KU,” Atkinson’s office said on an FAQ webpage for the Research Rising initiative. “It really is specifically targeted at those areas that have the highest potential for federal funding. Sustaining and growing federal funding is essential for the future of KU research.”

photo by: Courtesy: University of Kansas

Simon Atkinson, vice chancellor for research, University of Kansas

Problem solvers

The idea that this initiative centers around money, should not shock the sensibilities of anybody in the research world. After all, it may not have been Galileo, but it was some researcher of the world who determined it is money that makes it go around.

Thus, leaders have put up the $12 million of endowment money to ensure people take the time to think about what is possible. But Atkinson is pretty confident that the researchers with the winning ideas won’t be driven by the money.

If they were, they probably would already be somewhere else.

“KU is not going to be able to compete with the richest institutions in the country,” Atkinson said. “We won’t compete with Stanford, MIT, Johns Hopkins in terms of the lavish facilities they can afford to build or with hiring the professors who command the highest salaries.

“But what we can do is thoughtfully try to build intellectual communities.”

Or, perhaps even better, problem-solving communities.

“We’re a problem-solving type of place,” Atkinson said. “It is what motivates a lot of people.”

It is good job security too, because the world doesn’t appear to be running out of problems. Narrowing down the list to tackle might be the bigger challenge. KU has provided some guidance, listing five broad areas it is likely to focus on when reviewing proposals: lifespan issues associated with education, workforce, caregivers and other such issues; Earth, energy and environment issues; the human experience in the digital age; molecules and medicine; and security and safety.

What type of projects may emerge at KU is unknown. The proposals haven’t yet been submitted, and KU leaders aren’t offering guesses. But there are plenty of topics that long have floated around KU research circles.

KU has expertise in geology, and Kansas has some attributes that could make it ripe for carbon storage. Could KU be a leading research entity for that tool in fighting global warming? Or maybe it will involve using corn stalks and other agricultural waste to produce energy, a project KU researchers have been pursuing. Or perhaps it focuses on drones, where KU researchers have expertise in placing radar systems on the small flying machines. Or, maybe, cybersecurity, which has become a research focus as KU now has a specific laboratory facility on West Campus sanctioned by the U.S. military and national defense entities.

Or, quite likely, it will involve projects not on that list. Atkinson has said KU wants to see any thought-provoking idea, and he’s encouraging researchers to cross over department lines to collaborate with others in the KU community. That increases the odds that one of the ideas becomes the next big idea at KU.

“We have always had folks going after the big problems out there,” Atkinson said. “They are concerned about the future of the country and grappling with those big issues. We are maybe a little bit Kansas modest about touting that. But we have to communicate that better.”

photo by: Courtesy: KU Alumni Association/Dan Storey

KU Vaccine Analytics & Formulation Center staff members, from left, Ying Wan, former associate researcher; Oluwadara Ogun, assistant researcher; and Kaushal Jerajani, graduate research assistant, work in the lab to formulate and analyze vaccine candidates.

The need to rise

KU Chancellor Douglas Girod has a particular group in mind that needs to better hear that message: state legislators.

In a recent interview with the Journal-World, Girod was asked whether the Lawrence community understands the economic impact of KU research. He said it probably did not, but went a step or two further.

“I’m not sure people in Topeka understand it, quite honestly,” he said. “They don’t understand it in terms of importing dollars from outside the state of Kansas that turn into high-paying jobs and buying of products.”

A number for KU to tout is approximately $170 million. That’s how much KU received in federal research dollars in fiscal year 2019, with each dollar being an example of money coming from outside the state’s borders.

But it also is a number that can create some concerns. The figure is part of an annual report that measures federal research dollars received by public universities that are members of the prestigious Association of American Universities.

KU isn’t at the bottom of that list, but you can see it from there. In fiscal year 2019, KU’s federal research dollars ranked the seventh lowest out of the 36 public universities on the list. Looking back to fiscal year 2010, KU ranked eight from the bottom on the list. While KU’s federal research dollars grew in the decade — from about $148 million in 2010 — its growth wasn’t enough to keep up with its fellow AAU members.

With data like that, you could argue “rising” may be the imperative word in KU’s Research Rising initiative. Girod does think KU’s research funding is poised to grow. (While the 2019 report is the latest for the AAU schools, other metrics tracked by KU suggest federal research dollars grew by a little more than 9% in fiscal year 2020.)

“I think we really believe there is a path forward for 8% to 12% growth every year for the next four to five years,” Girod said of expected growth in research grant funding. “A lot of it will depend on what the federal funding model looks like and what is out there, but it looks like there is going to be more federal research funding, not less, for the foreseeable future.”

Atkinson also offers a number for federal research grants. “We need to get to $300 million some years from now, if we are going to stay on track,” he said.

That wasn’t phrased as an aspirational goal as much as it was a needs-to-happen goal. If you are looking for an aspirational goal, you could fashion one and it would even have its own theme song: “Georgia on My Mind.”

Atkinson highlighted that it is not just states like Massachusetts and California that excel in the research industry. Georgia Tech, a public university based in Atlanta, received $716 million in federal research grants in fiscal year 2019, the fourth-highest total of any AAU public university.

Atkinson didn’t project KU would grow its research portfolio to the size of Georgia Tech’s, but he said the two states aren’t that different.

“We could do that in Kansas,” Atkinson said. “We’ve got the research university assets to build on that.”

If KU could pull off a Georgia Tech-like performance, the implications for the economy likely would be huge. Girod recently told the Kansas Board of Regents that about $180 million worth of KU federal contracts are directly responsible for 2,000 to 2,500 jobs in the area. If that same ratio held true in the future, the area would gain another 7,000 direct jobs — and many more indirect jobs — if it could duplicate the Georgia Tech experience.

No one, of course is promising that, and history suggests such growth would be extraordinary. But you don’t have to look too hard to find some big growth stories, even with a school that looks a lot like KU.

Indiana University — a kindred spirit to KU when it comes to basketball fandom — had $79 million in federal research grants in 2010, and was dead last among AAU public universities. By 2019, it had $308 million in federal research grants and had passed KU and 14 other public universities on the AAU funding rankings.

So, big growth is possible, and Girod pulls a phrase from the sports world to explain what it will take to achieve it.

“Shots on goal,” Girod said. “It is having good proposals and getting them reviewed. But everybody else in the country will be doing the same thing.”

Intellectual powerhouse

That competition likely means who is taking those shots for KU will matter a lot.

In that regard, Atkinson, as the vice chancellor for research, is a bit like an NBA general manager responsible for assembling a team. Like any general manager, he would love to have superstars, but unlike some, he thinks it would be a mistake to set out to recruit a team of them.

While that might be an Ivy League or Silicon Valley approach, it likely isn’t the right one for KU, he said.

“As we hire people, we have to hire people who will build up the people around them,” Atkinson said. “You can hire superstars and they can be successful in their own areas. But I think a lot of those superstars are likely to move onto the next offer. And when they do, are they leaving anything behind?”

Instead, KU likely will have to take a more holistic approach.

“Lawrence, I think is an easy sell,” Atkinson said. “The community is a great asset. Then, we sell them on the colleagues they have and the sort of climate for doing research at KU. It is pretty collegial and collaborative, and people support each other.”

In the end, Atkinson hopes that atmosphere will be a real difference-maker for KU.

“If you get to a place where you don’t want to leave your colleagues, then you stay,” Atkinson said.

If that belief holds true, KU will have a research team filled with smart, seasoned members, many of whom have turned into homegrown superstars. At that point, KU will have its own, unique national reputation that will serve the university and the state very well, Atkinson said.

“We can be a destination for people who want to be in a vibrant, forward-looking community with a sort of rich, intellectual powerhouse at its heart,” Atkinson said. “People want to be in places like that. It tends to make what they are doing better. That certainly can be Lawrence.”