UTRGV and ORNL: Boosting Research While Building a STEM Talent Pipeline
A Q&A with Can Saygin
This fall the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley signed a memo of understanding with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to strengthen their research collaborations and establish a program for undergraduate research and education. Here, CT asks Can (John) Saygin, the senior vice president for research and dean of the graduate college at UTRGV, how the MOU will be carried out and what the impacts and advantages might be, for students, for research collaborations between ORNL and UTRGV, for graduate and undergraduate research programs at UTRGV, and ultimately for the nation's STEM pipeline.
UTRGV’s Can Saygin and ORNL Deputy for Science and Technology Susan Hubbard at the MOU signing. (Photo credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy)
Mary Grush: UTRGV is a relatively new university. Is it emerging as a research university?
Can Saygin: In 2015, UTRGV enrolled its first class of students — that was just eight years ago. But while UTRGV is a new university, it really has many years of history and experience behind it, as it comes from the merger of two legacy institutions in Texas. For its first eight years, its focus was on student success. But now, it's time to bring in the other layers that a public institution would have — including, and perhaps for us, especially research. And of course, research not only involves and benefits faculty, but when properly guided, research programs can contribute quite substantially to student success.
Grush: What is your role in guiding and establishing UTRGV as a research institution?
Saygin: I was hired in August 2022 as the senior vice president for research and dean of the graduate college. The mission that I have in front of me is to add strong research performance to UTRGV's portfolio.
We have 32,000 students — about 4,000 of those are graduate students, of which about 500 are doctoral students. Given this student population distribution, along with the range of disciplines that we have at UTRGV, we are in a very good position to enhance our research profile.
Grush: How do efforts like this recent MOU help?
Saygin: You can't be successful at research in a vacuum. You have to get out and develop partnerships, with companies, with economic development associations, and most importantly, with other institutions and national-level labs.
You can't be successful at research in a vacuum. You have to get out and develop partnerships.
Grush: The MOU with ORNL emphasizes opportunities for undergraduate research and education. Do you also have a focus on building graduate research collaborations?
Saygin: Yes, we do have a focus on graduate students, and faculty as well. The important thing is to build UTRGV's research capability and capacity overall, with the intent of becoming a Tier-1 research university within the next few years.
Grush: What else is important to know about the MOU?
Saygin: Looking at the specifics of the MOU, we decided that ORNL and UTRGV would work together on a program that would provide our students with STEM-related research and education opportunities. It started with questions about how you bring students into real-life research laboratories, and also bring them together with people from outside the UTRGV campus.
Grush: Does the program for undergraduate research and education created by this MOU ultimately open up a pathway for your students to prepare for STEM careers at the Department of Energy or with its partners, contractors, or labs?
Saygin: Yes, the program's impact is to benefit our students with real-world experiences that contribute to the nation's STEM pipeline and to student career paths. If you think about the student/career lifecycle, when students launch their careers, on-the-job learning has to happen really quickly. So, the real-life experience we can provide that prepares students for their careers is a priority. There is a need at the DOE level as well as at the ORNL level to strengthen the STEM pipeline, so that is our goal.
The program's impact is to benefit our students with real-world experiences that contribute to the nation's STEM pipeline and to student career paths.
Grush: Which STEM areas will be represented in this program, at least initially, and how will they be integrated into the curriculum?
Saygin: You can look at the DOE and at ORNL for some examples of their areas of development. The R&D work that they do extends across a wide variety of areas. Artificial intelligence for national security, bio-energy, climate change, battery manufacturing, energy storage — the list goes on. These are high-tech, applied R&D areas that will easily connect to industry and the current job market. So, there are many pathways that you can envision through this MOU and many possibilities for students' future employment readiness.
Grush: In what areas will the hands-on research opportunities for undergraduate students be, and what are some of the experiences students will have that they might not encounter in other academic programs?
Saygin: For the MOU, we want to leverage our current investment at the faculty level and at the ongoing research level. So, our current focus in the technology layer includes materials science and engineering, computer and computational science, biological and environmental sciences, nuclear science and engineering, energy efficiency, and renewable energy. And in another layer we can add national security research, which includes data and all sorts of computing and information science-related pieces.
One particular reason we started with materials science, engineering, and computer-related topics, is that we just began our Ph.D. program in materials science and engineering this fall. And in the fall of 2024 we will begin our doctoral program in computer science and engineering.
We want to offer a complete experience that encompasses all currently existing levels — undergraduate students, masters students, doctoral students, and faculty, together with ORNL research scientists. So, the real-life experience that we provide will target all possible layers of interaction within the existing core areas at UTRGV and ORNL.
Our plan is to bring undergraduate students to ORNL during the summer, where they can live, work in the labs with faculty and research scientists, and have access to many extraordinary ORNL resources. For the students, working on multidisciplinary projects in ORNL's state-of-the-art facilities has great relevance for their education goals.
For the students, working on multidisciplinary projects in ORNL's state-of-the-art facilities has great relevance for their education goals.
Grush: In light of the MOU, how will your curriculum address the greater research practices reflected in the DOE Office of Science's mission "to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time"? How could this affect the students' views of their own potential?
Saygin: At the undergraduate level, when you have hundreds of students going through hands-on lab applications, it is very difficult to customize those lab applications and simulate real-world research questions. One of the important goals that we have is to rethink how we define and generate student projects. We'll be opening this up to ideas from ORNL. When it comes to the analytical thinking that we want the undergraduates to develop, it's going to come through those hands-on projects, so that's where we'll focus our energy.
When we have a senior design project, for example, instead of making things up in our own back yard, we'll be taking some input from the research scientists at ORNL. Asking the right questions is at the core of this, and that's where students begin to realize their own ability to ask relevant questions.
And when we get to the masters and doctoral levels, we'll definitely have one-to-one matching topics that get much closer to real-world problems and contribute to the Oak Ridge portfolio as well as to research topics we have on campus. This is where we'll be able to ask faculty to work in depth with the graduate students and involve the ORNL research scientists as well.
Grush: An MOU is not a contract and only serves to formalize and document the intent of the parties. What will ensure the consistency of intentions and make this MOU successful?
Saygin: MOUs are very common; we are not unique in that way, and MOUs don't come with guarantees. But I believe this MOU will be successful. The "secret sauce" in the success of an MOU like this one is in picking the right people. In an MOU, if the partnering company or lab does not have people who are willing to work with you and put the capacity towards making it a success, the agreement becomes a one-way street and will not work.
The "secret sauce" in the success of an MOU like this one is in picking the right people.
Oak Ridge is an R&D institution that is very academic in nature, and that is exactly why the MOU is going to be successful. We've built the MOU on existing collegial relationships. And as part of the mentorship piece, we are planning to have some of the ORNL research scientists involved as adjunct faculty who can serve on dissertation and thesis committees. And that work becomes part of their own professional resumes — a "win-win" all around, among many winning strategies built into the MOU.