Goal 3: Integration of the ASRC Into CUNY-Wide Research and Education

Hundreds of CUNY scientists from outside the ASRC are users of these core facilities, including faculty and students from Baruch College, Borough of Manhattan Community College, Bronx Community College, Brooklyn College, College of Staten Island, Hostos Community College, Hunter College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Kingsborough Community College, Lehman College, Queens College, The City College of New York, and York College—with new users continuing to join.

Numerous CUNY faculty members have been hosted at the ASRC for activities ranging from mini-sabbaticals to temporary moves to accommodation of construction-related inconveniences on their home campuses. Faculty members taking advantage of these opportunities have so far come from Baruch College, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, Queens College, and Queensborough Community College.

These grants match research-active faculty across the campuses to ASRC partners, who then jointly execute preliminary experiments with the goal of generating preliminary data for external grant applications and/or publishable results. The ASRC Seed Grant Program attracts a broad cross section of research-active CUNY faculty, just as the program was originally conceived. To date, the ASRC has awarded seed grants to 56 CUNY faculty from 12 different campuses. CUNY awardees have gone on to publish the data collected and receive external grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, in fulfillment of the program’s overall goals. Virtually all of the submissions are to single initiatives and thus have become a mainstay of cross-campus departmental engagement.

This includes teaching undergraduate-level science courses at City College, Hunter College, Queens College, Brooklyn College, and LaGuardia Community College, among others, and actively participating in The Graduate Center’s science doctoral-degree programs, including biochemistry, biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, and physics. Faculty also co-mentor doctoral and master’s students with colleagues at most of the senior colleges.

Since 2016, the ASRC has increased its level of engagement with community college faculty and students. In this context, ASRC faculty and staff have been strongly supportive of undergraduate education via participation in a variety of summer programs (e.g., CUNY Summer Undergraduate Research Program, National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates, and CUNY-IBM Business-Higher Education Forum summer fellows) that engage individual students in ASRC labs as well as through involvement in the development of and participation in the IlluminationSpace. The IlluminationSpace has also brought in students from Borough of Manhattan Community College and LaGuardia Community College for STEM education events. ASRC faculty have organized scientific events of varying scopes (e.g., workshops, symposia, and seminar series), which have encouraged the on-site and remote participation of literally thousands of CUNY faculty and students.

We will proactively seek out opportunities for ASRC faculty to be engaged in teaching and service at both the senior colleges and community colleges, both to promote dialogue and to share work as appropriate to career stage. In particular, we will reestablish the ASRC Internal Advisory Committee to promote communication, and we will directly engage with Graduate Center executive officers as well as science department and program leaders across CUNY. We also see a need to assemble working groups that include stakeholders from the ASRC, The Graduate Center, and other campuses to address specific, recurring challenges.

Given the importance of making the core facilities available to members of the CUNY community of bench scientists, it will be important to ensure adequate input from that community. Therefore, it is proposed that all ASRC core facilities have advisory panels comprising mainly CUNY users, which will be provided with annual overviews of operations and given ample opportunity to provide input on the strategic directions of these facilities. We will also host core facility open houses at ASRC and Graduate Center events that would otherwise draw in faculty and students from other campuses, and continue to promote the core facilities through our website and print flyers disseminated to relevant science departments.

We have had success co-organizing symposia and seminars and have drawn significant numbers of CUNY faculty and students as attendees. Initiating a poll to gain further insights into the areas of interest, practical issues, and logistics will help us develop additional events.

Faculty members from the ASRC will focus additional resources to coordinate with Graduate Center executive officers in order to pursue recruitment efforts targeted at improving the quality and quantity of the incoming classes. This will have direct benefit to the talent pool of young researchers at ASRC as well as to all research-active groups in CUNY who are affiliated with The Graduate Center and its programs. As we consider new interdisciplinary educational programs, described earlier, we will work with relevant faculty from across CUNY to capitalize on unique opportunities at the ASRC that resonate with strengths elsewhere in the University.

The ASRC already hosts dozens of undergraduate students from a variety of senior and community colleges. Many of these come to us through programs, such as the CUNY Summer Undergraduate Research Program. There are also about a dozen master’s students working with ASRC faculty. We will continue efforts to identify strategic partnerships with CUNY colleges where the ASRC can provide unique additional training opportunities for undergraduate and master’s students.

Visiting faculty and students from other campuses can incur substantial burdens in terms of commuting times, a nearly impossible situation with no on-campus parking at the ASRC. To address the important geographic challenges separating ASRC from the CUNY campuses, we are deploying appropriate communication technologies, including teleconferencing and streaming systems, to allow seamless off-campus attendance at seminars and workshops and to enable remote operation of core instrumentation, where safe to do so. The ASRC actively uses CUNY-wide resources (e.g., Dropbox, Sharepoint) and advocates for the deployment of much-needed additions (e.g., eduroam) to facilitate network access and sharing of information across CUNY. Deploying a “one-stop” page on the ASRC website will also provide easy access to materials commonly needed for grant applications (e.g., facilities/instrumentation pages for NIH grants). This is intended to increase the number and quality of ASRC-CUNY faculty grant applications.