Coleman named vice provost for research

Coleman named vice provost for research

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff   

Rice’s new vice provost for research gets energized by the process of discovery and the creation of art, music and new ideas. Even though he won’t be joining the administration until September, he’s already excited about working with Rice faculty members and students who come to work each day driven by the desire to discover or create something new.

“Major research universities are not only about making great discoveries that advance scholarship in a wide range of fields and turning some of those discoveries into processes and products to improve people’s lives,” said Jim Coleman, who will succeed Jordan Konisky as vice provost for research. “They’re also about engaging students in the process of creating new knowledge and of attacking problems for which the answers are not yet known.”

COLEMAN

Coleman is currently the vice chancellor for research and professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia (MU). Since May 2003, he has overseen all aspects of the research enterprise at MU, whose annual research and development expenditures totaled approximately $220 million in fiscal year 2006.

MU is one of the few U.S. universities with its own schools or colleges of medicine, veterinary medicine, agriculture, engineering, law and journalism. MU’s federal research funding increased 189 percent between 1995 and 2005 – the second fastest growth rate in the Association of American Universities.

Continuing to grow Rice’s research portfolio

Coleman is hopeful that Rice will continue to grow its research portfolio as he assumes responsibility for helping achieve the Vision for the Second Century goal of increasing Rice’s visibility as a prominent research institution. He cited three factors that will facilitate this process.

“The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest federal sponsor of university research, is pushing for medical research to be much more interdisciplinary, and the Collaborative Research Center has great potential for Rice to engage in research with the institutions of the Texas Medical Center (TMC) and take advantage of NIH’s focus,” Coleman said.

“Also, the federal government is starting to dramatically increase its investment in areas in which Rice is already strong, such as nanoscience and computer engineering. My role will be to facilitate Rice faculty taking advantage of that increased federal investment,” he said.

”And it is clear that obtaining funding to answer the questions on science’s intellectual frontiers is going to require collaboration and interactions among scholars from diverse fields and backgrounds. I am really impressed with the collaborative culture at Rice, which will be a tremendous foundation on which research can grow and prosper.”

At MU Coleman led the process of improving the research infrastructure to facilitate the ability of its scientists to acquire research funding and conduct research, including the expansions of a very successful program to assist faculty in grant writing.  He led the opening of a new interdisciplinary Life Sciences Center and the development of new interdisciplinary centers for nano and molecular medicine and for autism and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Coleman played a major role in increasing the budget and scope of the campus-wide Center for Arts and Humanities. He served as a principal investigator on a National Science Foundation (NSF) Partnership for Innovation award, helping a group of researchers create a fundable proposal for new ways to store alternative fuels for the next generation of vehicles. He also served as the principal investigator on a project to build a new life science business incubator from the U.S. Economic Development Administration and two major biomedical research facilities funded by NIH.

Removing barriers to research

He focused a great deal of energy on removing barriers to faculty research. This included reorganizing technology transfer activities that led to large increases in invention disclosures by faculty and in the number of deals that MU made with the private sector to conduct research on and to commercialize those technologies. MU also relied heavily on Coleman to communicate the impact and importance of university research to a wide variety of audiences and to work with Missouri’s congressional delegation to help focus their efforts to support MU’s research.

“Jim Coleman’s extensive experience with all facets of research administration should help Rice significantly boost its profile as a major research university,” said Provost Eugene Levy. “As the senior research officer of the university, Jim will help strengthen Rice’s research infrastructure and further facilitate the faculty’s ability to obtain funding and conduct research.”

Coleman describes himself as “a strong advocate” for the role of research in undergraduate education, thanks to a mentor who got him excited about doing research while he was a sophomore at the University of Maine, where he majored in forestry.

He also remembers the thrill of having research integrated into the classroom experience in a course on plant developmental anatomy while a graduate student at Virginia Tech. “The instructor gave us a take-home test for which there were no known answers,” he said. “We had to go to the library, read the literature and then use what we learned in class to synthesize the information to hypothesize solutions.  That was really exciting and fun, and I knew then that I wanted to be a Ph.D. and go into research and to teach using this style.”

Coleman went on to earn two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in forestry and environmental studies at Yale University. He then did postdoctoral studies at Stanford and Harvard before joining the biology faculty at Syracuse University in 1990. 

From Syracuse he went to the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., serving first as executive director of the Biological Sciences Center and later as vice president for research and business development before moving on to MU.  He also served as a program officer for NSF’s Division of Integrative Biology and Neuroscience, and he directed the state of Nevada’s multimillion-dollar EPSCoR program, funded by NSF, that grew the statewide university research infrastructure.

Finding solutions to researchers’ needs

The most recent focus of Coleman’s research interests has been the ecological effects of environmental change, but his role as vice provost will keep him too busy to run a lab here. However, he looks forward to collaborating with faculty across campus and being an active member of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, in which he will be a tenured professor.

As vice provost for research, Coleman will advise Levy and take the lead on university-wide research issues, including coordination of multidisciplinary and interinstitutional collaborations. He will identify new areas for research, research support and the related needs for space. He will oversee interactions and research initiatives with other TMC institutions and also help develop relations between the university and federal, industry and other funding agencies.

Rice’s Office of Sponsored Research, Office of Technology Transfer and the Animal Resource Facility will report to Coleman. He will also serve on the Patent Committee, which reviews patentable ideas and provides advice on Rice’s intellectual property policies.

Oversight of graduate students has been transferred from the vice provost for research to a new position — dean of graduate and postdoctoral studies.

Coleman said it will be a year before his wife, Adele, and their two golden retrievers can relocate to Houston with him. So he expects to devote a lot of time to learning about Rice and the city of Houston and to getting up to speed in the job as quickly as possible.

The little bit of free time he will allow himself will be spent playing guitar and piano, walking the beach around Galveston, cheering on the Rice Owls in football, baseball and basketball, and finally getting to play squash again. (MU has no squash courts.)