Innovative research can be costly, and as the American and international funding landscapes shift, researchers in every field are urgently seeking new ways to support work that tackles the planet’s most complex challenges.At the George Washington University, leaders from the GW Alliance for a Sustainable Future (ASF) are charting a path forward through the new Research Champions initiative.
The goal of this undertaking is to build powerful collaborative networks within and among GW’s 10 constituent schools, inviting faculty into dialogue around three “research communities:” Energy, Technology and Decision Making; Cities, Communities and Infrastructure; and Planetary Well-Being and Civic Life.
These networks will be a resource through which GW researchers can share skills, build relationships, coalesce around areas of interest and explore new funding avenues, said Frank Sesno, ASF executive director and professor and director of strategic initiatives in the School of Media and Public Affairs.
“We are at a critical moment for scientific and sustainability research, both at GW and globally. We need bold and innovative ways to respond to the challenge,” Sesno said. “The Research Champions and the research communities they are building will drive new collaboration, research and funding. They will capitalize on GW's existing strengths and develop new ones as we pursue our mission to create new knowledge to inform policy, help people and have lasting impact.”
The three focus areas were chosen because they are narrow enough to spark useful ideation and collaboration while remaining broad enough to cover GW’s existing and emerging research strengths, said Robert W. Orttung, director of ASF’s Sustainability Research Institute and Research Champions co-leader. Each is spearheaded by a faculty member. Energy, Technology and Decision Making is led by ASF Director of Impact and Innovation Caitlin Grady; Cities, Communities and Infrastructure is headed by Vera Kuklina, research professor of global equity and social justice in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences; and Planetary Well-Being and Civic Life is led by Rachel Clark, director of policy and engagement at the Climate and Health Institute in the Milken Institute School of Public Health.
“One of the challenges with sustainability research is that it can be anything to anybody, and it’s often hard to define in a specific way,” Orttung said. “So we chose to focus in on these three buckets where GW faculty have strong research going on already and where there’s potential to build.” Energy, for instance, is an area of interest for GW researchers across the board—in public health, engineering, business, international affairs and elsewhere. “It made sense to focus early on these three areas and build out strategically.”
Because the initiative is still in its earliest stages, participating faculty will be instrumental in shaping it, Grady and Orttung said. The four leaders have been meeting regularly for several months, holding lunches and other small meetings facilitated by ASF. The next step is for interested faculty members from across GW’s constellation of disciplines to join the conversation.
“We’d like to invite as many people as possible to participate, whether or not we’ve already been in contact,” Grady said. “We want to hear from you.”
Orttung knows what a Research Champions success story might look like. As the director of the Elliott School of International Affairs’ Arctic Program, he’s seen the fruits of interdisciplinary collaboration firsthand. He was drawn into Arctic research about a decade ago as a faculty member of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies after meeting experts from GW’s Geography Department.
“They were focused on ice and permafrost and stuff like that, and they needed someone who was dealing with human beings and what all this climate change meant for human beings, so we started working together,” he recalled.
The exchange of skills went both ways. Orttung’s new collaborators showed him how to take on a hard-sciences-style National Science Foundation grant proposal, something that as a social scientist he hadn’t done before. One grant led to another, then another. Conversations spread across and beyond the GW network. The Arctic Program has now expanded to include multiple large grants with an Arctic component, ranging in focus from mining to tourism to urban infrastructure.
And as unique and critical as studying the Arctic is, it’s not the only such topic at GW, Orttung emphasized. The more faculty are able to connect with one another, the more common areas of interest will emerge and the more paths to study and funding will follow. Orttung and Sesno pointed to early-stage discussions already taking place around topics like data centers and natural disaster research.
“Once you have that critical mass of people working on a specific topic, it starts to grow,” Orttung said. “It becomes a community that builds on itself. The more we can do that, the better off we’ll be.”
