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President Greg Crawford
Hello. I'm Greg Crawford, president of ¾Ã¾ÃË®ÃÛÌÒ, and welcome to "In Such a Place," the podcast where we explore the future of higher education and the vital role colleges and universities play in shaping our world. Today, I am with prolific grant writer, scientist, and professor, Rick Page. We are going to talk about the importance of university research, how it is funded and conducted, and most importantly, what this means for the local community and society. Well, welcome to the podcast, Rick. We're so excited to have you here with us today.

Dr. Rick Page
Thank you, Greg. I'm excited to be here.

President Greg Crawford
Well, great. Let's just start with a few questions. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? A bit about yourself, your background, and what you do now at ¾Ã¾ÃË®ÃÛÌÒ,

Dr. Rick Page
I think I was incredibly fortunate growing up to be in a household that prioritized education but really emphasized freedom to pursue the path that I wanted to take. I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in California for my undergraduate degree in biochemistry, went to Florida State University to pursue a PhD in chemistry, and from there, I moved on to the Cleveland Clinic to do a postdoctoral fellowship. From there, I joined ¾Ã¾ÃË®ÃÛÌÒ. I'm a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Associate VP for Research and Innovation.

President Greg Crawford
Well, it's great to have you here. I always like to ask this question to scientists. I studied physics, but I kind of knew when I was 10, 11, or 12, that I was going to be a scientist, because I love to play with things at home and work on the lawnmower and the car, and my dad gave me a lot of flexibility to take things apart and probably never get them back just right together again. But just curious, where did that scientist sort of ambition come in to your life? How old were you, and when did it happen?

Dr. Rick Page
I think I was, was fairly young, probably in the 10 to maybe 12 range, and just really wanting to know more about how things worked, and really curious on a fundamental level, learning about, let's say, atoms and molecules, and just wondering how that connection works between what happens on that level and then what happens on the level that we see every day, right? What does it mean for how we work and function as humans? What happens in different diseases when things go wrong? Those kind of fundamental questions of, what's that connection? How does that work? That's really what drove me.

President Greg Crawford
Well, that's great. As Associate Vice President for Research, you get to see a lot of different sort of types of research. So can you explain the differences between pure, fundamental research, applied research, and translational research?

Dr. Rick Page
Yeah, I'd say that's one of the fun parts about my job, is really seeing the incredible variety of research that goes on at the university. Fundamental research, it's often called basic research, but there's nothing basic or easy about it. I call it discovery research when I'm communicating it to to others. You can't directly take the results of that and typically sell that as a product, right? But it is the foundation for all the things that we do. If you think about the industries that we have in society and the work that they do, it's all built on that foundation of fundamental research. Applied research, then, is really taking that foundation, building on it, and applying it to trying to solve practical problems and improve practices or products. So it's really as the name implies. It's taking that foundational research and then applying it to specific problems. Translational Research is then really more specifically applied research applied to human health. So this is the typical bench-to-bedside description that you'll see. Taking advances in fundamental research and applying those to what needs to be done to treat various diseases, and hopefully, the idea is, cure some of those devastating diseases.

President Greg Crawford
So you're sort of a player coach here at ¾Ã¾ÃË®ÃÛÌÒ when it comes to research and external funding. Can you provide an example of university research that's had significant impact on everyday life?

Dr. Rick Page
I think there's two primary examples that really come into my mind. The first is cancer drugs, and sort of shining example, I think, of that was the total synthesis of a chemotherapeutic drug called Taxol. This drug was discovered back in the 1960s it's a molecule that exists in the bark of a tree called the Pacific Yew tree. The challenge is that isolating that drug from that bark ends up killing the tree. So there's a limit on how much of this drug we were able to produce, based on how many of these trees there were and be able to harvest those. So the total synthesis, which is really just fancy chemistry language for taking simple building blocks, assembling those and putting those together to make the molecule you want. That was, was really revolutionary for cancer research and for cancer therapeutics, in terms of really being able to expand the amount of this drug that was available. I think the other example is really, you know, if you think about how, say this podcast is going to be disseminated. You think about the internet. All of the the university research that went into communication, protocols and and procedures that are really the backbone of how the internet works was tremendously important. That was fundamental research. It got applied, and now we reap the benefits of that every day.

President Greg Crawford
That's just a great example of how fundamental research actually translated into something that was really applicable, that we all utilize today. So how do universities balance pursuing the fundamental research with the need to address societal issues which can be much more applied?

Dr. Rick Page
So really thinking about how to do this, what fundamental research really needs? Some of the key factors there are time and space, right? So you need time and space to explore, fail, grow, and then repeat. And it's really has to be driven by these fundamental questions, and this, this search or thirst for knowledge, right? That's absolutely critical there to fundamental research. That then serves as the base that we build off of and can use and apply towards addressing some of these grand societal challenges. And it's really fundamental research on the front end that enables that and it allows other researchers to to apply that and and make the advances that we so greatly need.

President Greg Crawford
And more and more, as we kind of move into these more complex problems that we're trying to solve, as scientist, we see a lot of a lot of scientists forming teams. And very interdisciplinary teams; they're crossing boundaries between the sciences and engineering and many other disciplines, from philosophy to business, and so forth. So what role does interdisciplinary research teams play in advancing knowledge and solving these complex problems that we're working on?

Dr. Rick Page
Interdisciplinary teams have become ever increasingly more important in research. So I like to to think about it as if, as if you had a band, if you took members of a band and you put them in individual recording studios different parts of the country, you could take recordings of each one of them, put that together, and you can make music from that, and that music can sound great. What you miss, though, is you miss that interaction, right? You miss the just in, in time and space, the interaction just just mentally working with each other, riffing off of each other, right? When you take all those members and you put them in a single room, they're now able to collaborate with each other, and you develop things that otherwise wouldn't be possible. And that's what happens with the, happens with interdisciplinary research. You're bringing together people with diverse expertise, diverse views and opinions, and you're taking that and you're putting that together to try to solve a problem. And it's transformational.

President Greg Crawford
How important is interdisciplinary research and/or training in the classroom to our new students, our young students, our first-years, our second-years, our undergraduates?

Dr. Rick Page
I think it's incredibly important. When they graduate and they leave and then go out into the world, they are going to be expected to be leaders. They're going to be expected to to work in teams and to use those skills to advance the mission of wherever they are, whether it's, whether it's a nonprofit, whether it's industry, whether it's education, whether it's government. That teamwork portion is absolutely essential.

President Greg Crawford
You know, some of the aspects of research too, they really sort of benefit the community, the local community and society, as we already talked about. Another area they truly impact is around economic development and innovation for our community, our state, our government, the world, and so forth. And so maybe if you could talk a little bit about the connection between research and even from the fundamental starting point to its application and through economic development and sort of examples, or how that plays out in a place like ¾Ã¾ÃË®ÃÛÌÒ, or plays out in the country.

Dr. Rick Page
When we think about economic development, you know, we're often focused on on industry and what what companies do. But there is a really tremendously important and valuable interaction between universities and industry, universities and their communities. If you kind of think about that Venn diagram that gets set up and working in those intersections, there's incredibly valuable gains that can be made in each of those spaces. There's, I think, a number of instances across research where this is has really been been evident in terms of, let's say, taking interdisciplinary teams and then using that to drive forward innovation. One that's, I'd say, near and dear to my field, is the now prevalence of using artificial intelligence for predicting protein structures. If you think about the teams that you need to have the that was a wonderful example of university and industry partnerships coming together. You have computer scientists who have been working for many decades on artificial intelligence and those related technologies. You have structural biologists like myself who have been solving protein structures for for several decades now. And then you have data scientists who are trying to wrangle those hundreds of 1000s of protein structures, all that data together, all of them coming together as a team, yielding a tool and and really a new field that's now able to take really basic information about a protein, what its constituent amino acids are, what its sequence is, and use that to predict what the structure is going to be and what the function is going to be, how this is going to work. This is really leading to breakthroughs in in biomedical science. So we can take essentially, the genomes of humans and other organisms, and now we can predict the gene products of each of those when they're proteins. What are those going to look like? What does that mean for treating cancers? What does it mean for treating asthma, right? What does it mean for treating neurodegenerative disorders? And we don't know what the outcomes are going to be. We don't know how that's going to be applied. We don't know how that's going to be translated to the clinic, but it's incredibly exciting.

President Greg Crawford
It's fantastic. What was once science fiction is here today, for sure. And then there's always been a push to really, either commercialize or to really bring that sort of discovery, that basic discovery, as you mentioned earlier, from the bench, from the laboratory, to the bedside to help patients, or just to get it out there as society, to work for us. And at ¾Ã¾ÃË®ÃÛÌÒ, you know, we've been working hard on that, to really connect that kind of end-to-end process, where you start with fundamental research, you go through applied or translational, then ultimately you have an opportunity to commercialize it, if it's that ready. And so the Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College at Elm that just opened, has a lot of space for those that want to kind of start a company, or kind of probe something a little further or take it to the next level outside the campus. Can you say a little bit about that, on how this new resource at ¾Ã¾ÃË®ÃÛÌÒ, this sort of incubator in town, might be able to help us out, whether with economic development, or help out our community, or even help out our faculty and staff who have that, that big idea and that bold ambition to take it to the next step?

Dr. Rick Page
I see the lead in Rosemary Fisher Innovation College at Elm is really, if you think about we described earlier, with, with that, that Venn diagram, really being at the center, really being at the nexus there. And it brings together staff and faculty. It brings together students. It brings together community partners, industry partners, and it's that physical space for them to come together, to make advances, to to apply and translate that fundamental research that that goes on in our in our campuses. It is absolutely essential to our efforts to take what we do at the university and communicate that out and broaden that to society, to help the local community here in Oxford, Southwest Ohio, and then our broader community in this country and across the world.

President Greg Crawford
Universities, with their research priorities often do align with societal needs. Sometimes it's at the individual level, the professor is kind of aligning with a problem that they wish to solve. Other times, it may align with university priorities, and also it may align with industry priorities and so forth. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that sort of, the sort of the overarching mission of a university and how it aligns with priorities. And also maybe dive into a little bit about, you know, how do we work with industry, and how do we get that kind of input from those that need solutions from us, and get that into our research agenda?

Dr. Rick Page
You know, I think this goes back to really relying on that diversity of experience and expertise, focus and opinions, and then you absolutely rely on the ability of researchers to communicate out their findings and to bring inputs in, right? It's, it's a two way street, for sure. You know, I think gone are the days of the the lone inventor, late at night in their lab, toiling away on their own. It's we want to do this research. It is absolutely needed for society. And to do that, and to do that effectively, we have to be able to communicate that effectively. We have to be able to listen to the public and listen to industry about what what needs are, but that that interaction is, is absolutely necessary. You think about the industry, academia, partnership, thinking about challenges the industry is facing, bringing those to a university environment, and having faculty, staff and students work on those problems and generate solutions. Those are absolutely critical.

President Greg Crawford
One of the common misconceptions about university research is some can kind of put it in the category of being non-useful or esoteric. I would love to hear your thoughts on that, and sort of, how do we better address, sort of our impact and so forth on society with the general population, or those that think it's too esoteric and too non-applied?

Dr. Rick Page
Yeah. So I think the classic misconception is the old male professor in a lab coat, laboring away in the lab on their own, coming up with their eureka moment. And that is not what research looks like anymore. Research is diverse across all aspects, right? The topics are more diverse. The people carrying out the research are more diverse, and that's incredibly important for accomplishing the mission and the teamwork that we talked about earlier, right? These teams have to have people with different experiences and different expertise that they can bring that to bear on each of these challenges. I think another misconception is really the idea that academic research is is esoteric. I think, sort of the classic example that is the shrimp on a treadmill example that got, kind of run away with in in media and some, some other circles, and that project is really fascinating research when you dive into it. It's a combination of biomechanics and then looking at environmental pollution and the effects there. So it's not just plucking shrimp out of an aquarium and putting them on a treadmill in another aquarium just to see what happens. There are real results that come out of that that are informative and impactful. And so if you take some of these things in isolation, you kind of boil them down to what's the simple, most kind of direct experiment that's happening? Yeah, they can seem esoteric, they can seem a bit out there, but it's in understanding them, we need to put them in context, and we also, as as researchers, need to work on on how we communicate that context, how we communicate that importance, how we convey that to society.

President Greg Crawford
So I wanted to talk about sort of the evolution of research in recent years. Certainly, every sort of industry changes, and research is probably one that changes most quickly. Universities, we no longer just do our research and hand it off to industry, right? We're much more integrated and connected, and so it would be great if you could discuss the role and collaboration that universities and industries have been having in translating research to more practical application, and the integration of these two to actually come out with even better and maybe even quicker solutions.

Dr. Rick Page
That collaboration is absolutely essential, right? Industry and universities have each a different focus. They each have a different, at times, mission and different drives, and they have very different capabilities. And those those differences are not things that I think that we should looking, be looking at as this sets us apart, or this makes us so incredibly different. Those differences are strengths that we can pull together and rely on. Right? There is really a gap between what universities can do and what industry can do, and it's bridging that gap. That's what the collaboration does.

President Greg Crawford
That's great.

Dr. Rick Page
You know, an example of that is drug discovery in research. The fundamental research that goes on at universities, identifying fundamental biological mechanisms, how various proteins work, how various signaling pathways work, and then what that means for identifying particular pathways or particular targets to go after for treatments and cures and diseases. And then that collaboration with industry to then take that, translate that, apply that, to develop lead candidates, to take those lead candidates and turn those into actual therapeutics that are used to treat or cure diseases, that university-industry collaboration there is absolutely essential to that process.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, I love that example too, because sometimes we want just quick results, right, out of our research. And, you know, everyone wants to be quick and so forth and have it kind of hit society fast, but that's an example of university-industry collaboration and drug discovery that can take decades. Can you provide an overview of some of the most pressing challenges that we are currently facing in higher education, and then kind of pivot, and let's get back to research and how the research contributes to actually solving some of those specific challenges?

Dr. Rick Page
I think two really pressing and fundamental challenges that I'm seeing at institutions of higher education, one is public perception of the value of universities, and then the other is the funding model for universities. And really, with public perception is growing questions about the value of universities and degrees. I think research is absolutely essential for responding to that. I like to look at this, really, this perception issue, not as as a bad development or a existential threat, but really it's an opportunity to expand our impact, to provide direct examples of, really, the multitude of ways that that universities positively impact societies. It's communicating the value of research, the growth that that leads to, innovation, growth in our economies, the benefits that it provides locally, statewide, nationally and and across the globe. You know, research is a is a tremendous example of the value and positive impact of the university, and I think it's also a clear path that we have for communicating to the public and really countering some of those perception issues. On the revenue side, the models for funding a university are are in flux. You know, there's some various revenue streams to think about. I think research is incredibly important for that, diversifying those streams, uh, trying to diversify the experience for students, right? Their classes are incredibly important, and their classes are not the only place that they learn. They're learning all over campus. They're learning in our labs, in our studios. It's, you know, learning does not stop after, let's say, a presentation from a professor ends, right? It doesn't end just when you finish your homework. There are so many more avenues and in ways in which students can learn and that students can contribute to the research and to the innovation, I think, both on the funding side and on the public perception side, that's a real strength that research can assist with.

President Greg Crawford
You know, I'd kind of love to know say, you know, as a chemist, and you've trained many undergraduate students, but let's say they decide not to go into chemistry or be a scientist or go into academia, but they do research with you, then they go off and do something else in business or some other area in industry after they graduate, can you say a few words about how, like, that research experience helps them more broadly train and how that helps them in their career?

Dr. Rick Page
Yeah, so it's, you know, I look at it and I'm never, I'm never heartbroken when a student says that, oh, you know, chemistry really isn't what I want to do, right, or they want to pursue a different career. I really look at it as it's really tremendously exciting to see all the things that they do. I go back to what we started with, how I was raised, was this really encouragement to find what you love doing and go after that and pursue that. And what is just so awesome to watch is how our students practice that and live that all the time, how they find what they're interested in, how they find what they're passionate in, how they take that and they develop that into careers, and how they make such just outstanding advances and impacts once they they leave campus. It is very exciting to watch. It's, it's really, I think, as as an academic, it's really part of what gives me a lot of energy, seeing what they do, seeing how they take bits and pieces of what we do in classes, and then the research lab, they're really getting training and experience and expertise in how to look at a problem, how to analyze it, and then figure out, what do I do next? And that is something that you can certainly apply to chemistry, but you can apply that to many, many other things.

President Greg Crawford
Well, this has been a very valuable and insightful conversation on research impacts in higher ed and society and how research impacts us all in very important ways. Thank you, Rick for all that you do for ¾Ã¾ÃË®ÃÛÌÒ, your extraordinary work as a scientist, a leader, training students, and now your new role as Associate Vice President of Research. Thank you for being here, Professor Page.

Dr. Rick Page
Thank you, Greg. It's been wonderful.

President Greg Crawford
Thanks for listening to this episode of "In Such a Place" from ¾Ã¾ÃË®ÃÛÌÒ. Stay tuned for more great episodes wherever podcasts are found.