The Core User Facility (CUF) strategic planning initiative calls for attention to both research and teaching facilities in science, technology, engineering and medical (STEM) disciplines at NIU. The goal of the initiative is to promote the sustainability of these facilities, by ensuring that they have appropriate support staff, maintenance and upkeep, and replacement cycles. The initiative will improve the quality and efficiency of our operations, by allowing multiple users to access shared facilities. At the same time, it will provide higher quality support to our research and teaching efforts, and will better leverage funding opportunities.
Research and teaching in the STEM disciplines rely heavily on state-of-the-art equipment and technical support. The purchase, maintenance and operation costs of such equipment typically place it outside of the reach of individual investigators. When such funds are found to purchase equipment, there is often a challenge to provide adequate staff, maintenance and upgrades to support the facility, or to provide for long-term replacement of equipment.
Over the years, the university has built up research and teaching facilities, but these have been established in an uneven fashion. There are some shared research facilities, and a variety of equipment and facilities within individual laboratories. In some cases, there exist well-equipped laboratories and sophisticated instrumentation other cases; in other cases, equipment has not been adequately staffed or maintained. Teaching laboratories are likewise unevenly equipped and maintained, without a coordinated structure in place for maintaining and upgrading equipment.
The lack of a structured approach to supporting STEM facilities costs the university in a variety of ways. Equipment and facilities have been needlessly duplicated, while existing facilities have been allowed to fall into disrepair. The lack of appropriate staffing means that researchers who control equipment must either take time away from their own work to make their equipment available to others, or must deny others access to their facilities. The university is not taking full advantage of opportunities for external funding, including both opportunities for equipment purchase and opportunities to support operating costs on external grants.
Therefore, this strategic planning initiative calls for the creation of a system of core user facilities: multi-user research facilities with dedicated staff and cost-recovery mechanisms that will recapture the funds needed to operate the facility from fees paid by the users. There is a parallel need to ensure appropriate support for the university’s teaching labs.
There are exciting and innovative research efforts in the physical and life sciences taking place at NIU. These efforts can be unequivocally strengthened and made nationally competitive through investments in new and synergistic collaborations. If it becomes possible to coordinate the use of existing facilities and future core user facilities we will be able to optimize resources, and reduce redundancy to the benefit of investigators at NIU. New investments in increased opportunities for interactions of principal investigators in common focus areas would similarly enhance interdisciplinary and complementary efforts, and thus contribute to increased innovation and competitiveness. Increasing the use and access to staffed Core User Facilities will be of great benefit to the system and the region and strengthen the research efforts and collaborations across the university.
The creation of core user facilities will require the design and implementation of new models for supporting research and teaching laboratories. The key elements of the design stage will be:
A successful business model to establish a facility as a cost-recovery center will require a careful balance of factors. First, they must charge enough in user fees to meet their costs. Next, since access to funding from federal grants will be a critical source of revenue for most facilities, the model must be fully compliant with federal funding guidelines. In particular, in setting rates, they must have a preferred rate for federal grants, and must recover costs from all users if they do so for users with federal funding. Third, there must be some means of providing access for members of the university community who cannot afford the federal rate. Finally, they can recover costs from users outside of the university, but they must be competitively priced to do so. A careful business model is therefore needed to balance these concerns. The strategy is to examine best practices at other universities to develop a basic model or template for facility business plans, and then adapt that model to the particular circumstances of each facility.
Complementing the business models for the facilities, there must be new funding models for their clients. There are several aspects to this:
The implementation stage will have the following steps:
Given the complexity of the CUF model, it is essential that careful planning precede implementation. The key steps in creating a CUF model for NIU are:
The first step is the development of templates for business plans that can be used to evaluate research labs and teaching labs. These templates must address both the physical aspects of the facility (current condition of the facility; staffing needs to operate it; planned lifecycle; etc.) and the financial aspects (cost of operation; demand; existence of competing facilities on campus and in the region; market rate for the services it would provide; requirements for compliance with federal funding guidelines; etc.), and provide a model for integrating all of those considerations to determine the conditions under which the facility could operate successfully as a cost recovery center.
Once the model has been established, a survey of existing facilities can provide the data needed to evaluate them against that model. This should produce estimates of short-term and long-term costs for each facility. Given those estimates, there will then need to be administrative decisions as to which facilities to establish as core user facilities.
A separate but parallel process will operate for teaching laboratories: develop a template for evaluating the short-term and long-term costs for maintaining each facility at an appropriate level; gather information about existing facilities; apply the template to each; and make decisions and allocations for a long-term funding plan for teaching laboratories.
The first steps in the design stage are now underway:
Next steps will involve refining the preliminary report from Hanover and seeking detailed information about the models used at other institutions. A tentative timeline for the project is
2009
2010
2011 – 2013
The expected outcomes of the project include: