Battelle study identifies statewide strengths of research universities
Battelle, the world's largest nonprofit independent research and development organization, was commissioned by the Arkansas Research Alliance to conduct the first independent study of university-based research competencies in Arkansas.
The study revealed that university research funding in Arkansas increased 70 percent from 2001 to 2007, growing from $141 million to $240 million. This surpassed the U.S. growth rate of 51 percent; however, when compared with the overall size of the state’s economy, Arkansas university research falls short. Nationally, university research comprised 0.36 percent of total national economic output in 2007; in Arkansas, university research reached 0.25 percent. To keep pace with the 2007 national average, Arkansas needed to increase university research by $106 million.
Released during a press conference held at the Arkansas State Capitol in April 2009, the fact-based study achieved the following goals:
- Determine core competencies found across the base of university research in Arkansas that point to areas of research depth and excellence.
- Identify strategic focus areas that build upon these core competencies and connect to growing markets and industries in Arkansas today.
Nine strategic focus areas have been identified and need to accomplish the following in order to serve as investment targets for the ARA:
- Advance Arkansas in multidisciplinary fields of research and enable Arkansas to outpace leading academic institutions that have strengths in narrow academic fields.
- Encourage collaboration among Arkansas institutions so that research capacities can be far-reaching and not restricted by location.
Strategic focus areas:
1 // Enterprise Systems Computing
Arkansas’s strength is in developing the applications and platforms for advancing industrial computing that addresses information quality, business intelligence, managing terra-bytes of data and addressing large system architectures.
2 // Distributed Energy Network Systems
Arkansas has an opportunity to become a national leader in smart energy grids and advancing the integration of distributed energy sources.
3 // Optics and Photonics
Arkansas has an existing base of optics research that uses lasers for materials development, processing and manufacturing, and emerging areas of optics research in medical diagnostics, defense and security, and astronomy.
4 // Nano-Related Materials and Applications
Opportunity exists to leverage the wide variety of nano-material developments and focus on applications including agriculture, food safety and biomedical.
5 // Sustainable Agriculture and Bioenergy Management
Making the most of statewide interest in advancing sustainable agriculture and sustainable energy, Arkansas can address agriculture and bioenergy as an integrated system of growing, transporting, and processing feedstock and developing co-products.
6 // Food Processing and Safety
Arkansas is a leader in food safety with a growing interest in nutrition.
7 // Personalized Health Research Sciences
Arkansas has strengths in pharmacogenomics research and has growing strengths in food safety, nutritional analysis and health behaviors. “Personalized health” would provide systematic, predictive and preventive approaches to health care delivery.
8 // Behavioral Research for Chronic Disease Management
Arkansas can build upon growing interest in disease prevention and control by using behavioral change approaches as a focus of intervention.
9 // Obesity and Nutrition
With the recent establishment of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity and a U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded research center, Arkansas is well positioned to advance research in Type 2 diabetes.
