Core Research Facilities & Research Leaders

Core research facilities are vital infrastructural components of modern research organizations.

Presented below is an adapted excerpt from chapter 4 of my book, Catalyzing Research: Research Leaders and the Complex Faculty/Administration Interface. (Previous articles in Medium’s Catalyzing Research publication presented adapted excerpts from the book’s introductory chapter and chapter on research leaders [part 1|part 2].)

Core Research Facilities

Core research facilities — shared facilities that provide researchers across an institution with access to advanced technologies, expensive research equipment, and skilled personnel arrayed into platform areas (such as genomics, imaging, and mass spectrometry) — are vital infrastructural components of modern research organizations. Core facilities extend the capabilities of faculty and other researchers at the institution, with user fees that scale with the level of facility use. Provided successful operation, from both scientific and management points of view, cores accomplish this extension of researchers’ capabilities in a more efficient manner than having these technologies, equipment, related computer hardware and software, and dedicated staff located within the labs of individual principal investigators.

Importance to the Research Enterprise

A journal article I wrote in 2009 was among the first papers related to the management of core facilities within research organizations, filling a gap in the literature. Its introduction remains relevant as a means of demonstrating the importance of cores to the research enterprise:¹

The race is on to develop and effectively use core research facilities to strengthen institutions’ research enterprises. Although the impetus to do so varies across disciplines and institutions, it is becoming increasingly clear that the performance of research in many areas … requires complex, expensive technical equipment that often requires operation by dedicated, skilled scientific personnel.

Research institutions — universities, academic medical centers, and independent research institutes — are increasingly realizing the important role that core facilities play in their:

- Ability to conduct cutting-edge research

- Competitiveness for recruiting and retaining strong faculty members

- Competitiveness for external research funding

With this realization comes an understanding that more attention needs to be placed on effective, proactive, and strategic management of these important components of institutions’ overall research enterprises. Example questions being considered include: How should core facility investment decisions be made; How should core facilities be governed and evaluated; and How can core facility sharing and use be enhanced?

An increasing number of research organizations are utilizing cores to house and professionally maintain newly purchased equipment as part of faculty start-up packages, and many are having success convincing new faculty recruits that a network of strong cores across the institution is better positioned to support their research than the alternative of advanced equipment being purchased using start-up funds and placed within individual faculty labs, requiring expensive service contracts and other costs.

Additional trends continue to be observed:¹

• Major research institutions are working to better understand their portfolios of existing core facilities and to better manage these facilities
• Emerging research institutions (and consortia of such institutions) are working to create new core facilities … to jump-start their research infrastructures and increase their research capacities and competitiveness
• Some research institutions with major medical schools and large core facility user bases are investing heavily in areas such as centralized administrative and management offices and sophisticated, Web-enabled information systems to support their core facilities

An excerpt from another paper I authored highlights some of the financial efficiency benefits of core research facilities:²

By design, core research facilities are a move toward increased efficiency and effectiveness. Cores offer the potential for greater efficiency related to equipment purchase, repair, and service contracts. On the personnel side, cores offer the potential for greater efficiency related to salaries and benefits for technical, service-oriented staff. As others have stated:

- “Institutions establish core facilities because they recognize that advanced technologies must be provided to maintain or improve institutional competitiveness. They recognize that they can afford to provide these technologies only with centralization.” ³

- “The equipment in core facilities is generally of the very expensive kind, difficult for faculty to justify for their own individual laboratories, and is generally an instrument on which important experiments can be performed in fractions of the available instrument operating time.” ⁴

Complexity at the Faculty/Administration Interface

Recall that Part Two of this book addresses focus areas for research leader attention and energy that satisfy the following two criteria:

1. Increased understanding of, and engagement in, the focus area has the potential to enhance the research leader’s ability to catalyze research across the enterprise and organization.
2. The focus area exists and functions at the complex faculty/administration interface, a characteristic that, in part, has led some research leaders to shy away from fully engaging and investing time, energy, and resources in the area.

Core research facilities are firmly at the faculty/administration interface, adding a layer of complexity to their strategic management. Cores enable faculty and their labs to productively conduct research, and thus are very close to the domain of faculty. Physically, cores are often located in research buildings among faculty laboratories and offices. At the same time, cores require significant institutional investments and access to organizations’ information technology and financial systems for scheduling and billing, and they have important regulatory compliance considerations related to rate setting and other areas — properties that pull them close to the administration.

[C]ore research facility excellence — and metrics that attempt to measure this property — necessarily include elements related to scientific contribution and relevance and elements related to financial effectiveness and efficiency.

The management of core research facilities is already complicated enough:¹

The diversity and complexity of the core facilities are matched by the diversity and complexity of the research institutions in which core facilities operate. This diversity can increase core facility management challenges faced by research institutions and can make it difficult for members of leadership to feel knowledgeable and comfortable with their institution’s portfolios of core facilities.

Core facilities’ position at the challenging faculty/administration interface only adds to the challenge. For example, core research facility excellence — and metrics that attempt to measure this property — necessarily include elements related to scientific contribution and relevance and elements related to financial effectiveness and efficiency.

[T]he faculty/administration interface likely will continue to grow in importance as cores evolve with research organizations.

The following list of core facility challenges and opportunities further demonstrates their position at the interface.¹ In some of these areas, the most relevant actors are faculty members, while in others they are members of the administration — but all necessitate both sides working together.

• Core research facility access rules, policies, and processes
• Understanding of “Who pays for what?”
• Processes and pathways for creating new core research facilities based on faculty needs
• Philosophy and culture for sharing research equipment and technologies at institutional and unit or discipline levels
• Core facility business model development and execution
• Institutional service center (and related) policies and procedures governing core facility operations and management
• Performing rate calculations based on actual costs
• Decision processes in arriving at rates charged to users (e.g., subsidy sources)
• Predicting demand for core research facilities
• Estimating use of new, emerging core facilities and factoring these estimates into subsidy requirements and expected charge-backs
• Managing the queue of users
• Tracking use and utilization, conducting billing, and related activities (with or without sophisticated systems and databases)
• Understanding and managing regulatory compliance
• Links between planning and maturation curves for technologies and facilities
• Processes and policies related to core facility review and evaluation
• Process for new core facility start-up (e.g., starting from faculty needs and ideas)
• Costs and benefits of facility duplication and redundancy
• Sustainability planning
• Policies and procedures related to sunsetting core facilities
• Organizational and governance structures (and relationship to the size, history, and culture of institutions and units)
• Core facility decision-making processes and individuals involved
• Role of formal and informal advisory councils, committees, and groups in decision-making and investment
• Potential economies of scale and efficiencies from sharing technical/administrative staff among facilities
• Institutional core facility investment amounts and goals
• Incentivizing joint and leveraged investments in core facilities from department chairs, directors, deans, vice presidents for research, provosts, and other leaders and stakeholders
• Equipment funding sources, models, and challenges
• Institutional matching fund polices and processes for shared equipment grants
• Internal selection processes for limited submission-shared equipment grant programs
• Benefits and costs of investments in sophisticated systems (e.g., scheduling, use-tracking, billing, and data delivery)

The role of the administration in the strategic management of core research facilities has grown as cores have evolved and taken on larger roles within research organizations. In a parallel fashion, administration-related emphases have emerged and expanded within organizations such as the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities, the leading membership organization for core research facilities in the United States.⁵ Similar efforts are underway internationally, and the faculty/administration interface likely will continue to grow in importance as cores evolve with research organizations.

Potential Risks and Rewards

A number of potential risks stem from research leaders who shy away from proactively managing core facilities at their institutions. Accompanying the potential risks of inaction in this area, a number of potential rewards can stem from increased research leader attention on more deeply understanding institutional core research facilities and more fully engaging in their strategic management. Helpful improvements could include increases to core facility efficiencies and the development of productive interinstitutional core facility partnerships.

Not included in this excerpt are specific examples in the book from my consulting experiences that highlight:

• Potential risks of research leader inaction — specifically: (1) hampered core facility investment decision making, and (2) suboptimal governance and advisory structures
• Potential rewards from research leader attention — specifically: (1) effective core management infrastructure, and (2) enhanced core review and evaluation

References

1. Haley R. A framework for managing core facilities within the research enterprise. Journal of Biomolecular Techniques. 2009; 20(4):226–230.
2. Haley R. Institutional management of core facilities during challenging financial times. Journal of Biomolecular Techniques. 2011;22(4):127–130.
3. Slaughter CA. Bright but demanding future for core facilities. Journal of Biomolecular Techniques. 2005;16(2):167–169.
4. Murray R. Shared experimental infrastructures. Analytical Chemistry. 2009;81(21):8655.
5. Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities. https://abrf.org. Accessed August 30, 2017.

This material is excerpted and adapted from the book, Catalyzing Research: Research Leaders and the Complex Faculty/Administration Interface.

RAND HALEY has devoted his career to helping organizations strengthen their scientific research enterprises. He has partnered with leadership and faculty at a wide range of leading and emerging research institutions and led research strategy and management projects at over 50 organizations.