Dear Colleagues,
As we close the Fall Semester, I am writing to you to let you know what new large scale projects the Vice Chancellor for Research Office will be focusing on in the Spring of 2017. We will continue to work hard on the collaborative research initiatives that we selected for development in the Fall term, and we will also continue on the path we have charted for improvement in Research Administration. In addition to these, we will also undertake exploration and planning on two important topics:
Entrepreneurship as a path for Societal Engagement
Undergraduate Research and Discovery Experiences
Entrepreneurship is one of many ways in which our faculty, students, staff, and alumni engage directly to achieve societal impact. In the last several years, interest in entrepreneurship has increased dramatically at Berkeley, and this is a good time for our community to consider our aspirations. Entrepreneurship is a vitally important path for many of us. I can attest to the extent to which my personal scholarship has benefited intellectually from my entrepreneurial activities (see thisessayon my research group webpage). Is there a Berkeley style of entrepreneurship that we should seek to develop in common? How does entrepreneurship fit into the life of a scholar and into the ways in which we evaluate scholarship? There are many programs that support entrepreneurship at Berkeley; do they work together well? Are there missing pieces? Finally and above all, how does this mesh with the much broader mission of the University to discover new knowledge, develop people, and to do so with a focus on the public interest?
Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education Cathy Koshland and I will also cosponsor campus wide discussions on the topic of Undergraduate Research and Discovery Experiences. Our Berkeley Undergraduates have so much to gain from and so much to contribute to the research activities at Berkeley. We would like to assess what is happening now in dozens of programs across campus and collectively define what our campus goals for undergraduate research should be. Can undergraduate research be a springboard to advance the interests of an ever broader group of undergraduates? Could it become the defining experience of a Berkeley undergraduate education? What experiences work best in different disciplines? How can the campus help faculty and departments to share best practices and to best achieve their goals in this area? Here as well, many excellent programs exist around the campus such as, for instance, the outstandingURAPprogram. Are these programs well coordinated across Colleges? Should we enhance or add to them? How can our campus better incentivize and encourage faculty to be involved in mentoring undergraduate research? Have we thought enough about the important role senior graduate students and postdoctoral and visiting scholars might play in mentoring undergraduate research? Are our alumni suitably engaged in this? Could we enhance the experiences of our undergraduates and the quality of their education by partnering more systematically with neighboring institutions? Could research experiences be better structured to significantly diversify disciplines and professions that remain closed to underrepresented communities?
These two topics are closely related and vital to the future of research at Berkeley and our effectiveness in developing them will play a key role in how we fulfill our public service mission. I invite all of you to think about these issues over the break. I will send out a note in January with a calendar of events for the semester. Our goal will be to synthesize a larger picture of entrepreneurship and undergraduate research and discovery experiences at Berkeley and to report on the outcomes and resulting plans by the end of the semester. If you wish to be more involved, possibly even to participate in the planning for these events, please write to me directly atpaul.alivisatos@berkeley.eduoutlining your interests.
Best regards, Paul
A. Paul Alivisatos
Vice Chancellor for Research University of California, Berkeley
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