RICE: Where Are We Now? Where Can We Go?

Collaboration Across Institutions

Another focus was on the need for interinstitutional collaboration. In today’s research climate, a small university on its own cannot maintain distinction or critical mass in terms of funding and research facilities. It must be resourceful in cooperating with other institutions with shared interests.

First, we wished to sharply increase interaction with the Texas Medical Center, especially, Baylor, the University of Texas, and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and our efforts in this regard have produced notable results. We now have nearly 90 research and training partnerships with the internationally known institutions of the Medical Center. In addition, we are considering how to make the most strategic use of the land that connects us physically to the Medical Center. Our property at University Boulevard and Main Street—the site of old Tidelands Motel—could link Rice science and engineering to the research and treatment going on at Medical Center institutions. With or without this joint effort, Rice must position itself at the center of the most important developments in the life sciences of the 21st century: biotechnology and nanotechnology.

We also sought to expand our cooperation with other Texas universities—especially the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Houston, and Texas A&M—and with institutions and industries, such as Texas Instruments, that would be valuable in projects that involve cross-disciplinary training of graduate students, major research funding, expensive equipment, and technology transfer.

Among the dozens of fruitful partner-ships we have joined in is the Gulf Coast Consortium, funded in part by a grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation. Areas of research undertaken through the consortium include cancer research, bioinformatics, and various other areas of biotechnology as well as environmental science and engineering. The consortium, which has been called a model for the international scientific community because of the high level of interinstitutional cooperation involved, includes Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Houston, and several University of Texas branches—UT Health Science Center at Houston, UT Medical Branch at Galveston, and UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Some consortia efforts even go beyond Texas borders to take in the University of Alabama, Mississippi State University, the University of Central Florida, and Louisiana State University, among others.

RICE: Facilities