Thursday, July 21, 2005 | 10:40 a.m.
In his UNLV laboratory on Tuesday, biological sciences professor Allen Gibbs was hard at work trying to understand how a certain gene allows some fruit flies to resist stressful desert conditions such as extreme heat and lack of water.
By understanding how the insects survive, Gibbs said, he can gain insight into how other, larger animals survive in the desert by using similar mechanisms.
He's also trying to understand a gene that makes some fruit flies fat in order to better understand how humans store fat.
Gibbs' research, paid for by National Science Foundation grants, advances his field and provides educational opportunities for students, he said.
His current $240,000 grant also helps cover some of the university's overhead costs, allowing officials to divert that money into additional research endeavors that can improve the educational quality of the university, advance human knowledge and diversify the state's economy by attracting new businesses to the area, university officials said.
Research, and the benefits it brings, is the "future" of the Nevada System of Higher Education, Board of Regents Chairman Bret Whipple and Vice Chairwoman Dorothy Gallagher said. They want to help bring more researchers like Gibbs into the state's institutions by establishing a new regents committee dedicated to research.
The committee, if approved by the rest of the regents, would help educate regents on what the state's institutions are already doing to increase their research dollars and how the regents can better support those efforts, Whipple and Gallagher said.
The committee would also help the institutions network with Nevada businesses and political officials to raise both private and public money to invest in research.
The goal is to develop a research model similar to the Georgia Research Alliance, Chris Chairsell, interim vice chancellor for academic and student affairs, said. The private nonprofit alliance of state, university and business and industry investment has raised Georgia' research efforts and bolstered its economy tremendously over the last 15 years, Chairsell said.
Chairsell strongly supported making research its own committee to help unite the system's efforts. It is currently one part of the regents' academic, research and student affairs (ARSA) committee.
The state's three research institutions -- UNLV, UNR and Desert Research Institute, have all increased their research capacity greatly over the last few years and upped their research dollars, Chairsell and others said. But Chairsell believes that the institutions need to unite together with the Legislature and the private community to really be competive as research institutions.
"I think we need to bring those forces together now and see how we can take the next step forward," Chairsell said. "And that's very, very exciting."
UNLV, UNR and DRI were all still auditing their research numbers for fiscal year 2005, but initial estimates show that all three institutions increased their research dollars.
UNLV's research dollars increased by more than 42 percent, from $47 million in fiscal year 2004 to $67 million in 2005, spokesman Joe Cockrell said.
Total external funding for 2005 is estimated at $95 million, $21 million more than in 2004.
UNR increased its research funding by $4 million, from about $68 million in fiscal year 2004 to $72 million in 2004, spokesman Patrick McDonnell said. Total grants and contracts topped $129 million, or an increase of 7 percent over 2004's $121 million.
DRI has seen its research revenue increase by about 13 percent this year, from $30 million in fiscal year 2004 to $34 million in fiscal year 2005, President Stephen Wells said.
Wells said he believed a research committee would help the institutions communicate with regents and each other where they are at in terms of research. Research items tend to "get lost" in the larger business of the ARSA committee.
Improved communication in turn will help the regents and the institutions see what more needs to be done, Wells said.
No one from UNLV or UNR was able to comment on the proposed committee, spokesmen for both universities said.
Of the 11 remaining regents on the board, all but Regent Howard Rosenberg expressed openness to Whipple and Gallagher's plan this week. Several regents had logistical questions about how the committee would work, but most said the idea made a lot of sense and that regents needed to pay more attention to the system's research efforts than was currently possible under the ARSA committee.
But as chairman of the ARSA committee, Rosenberg said he didn't like the idea "one single bit."
The whole point of research is to support the academic enterprise, Rosenberg, a UNR art history professor, said.
"Discussing one without discussing the other is stupid and a waste of time," he said.
Rosenberg feared the committee might become too focused on "money and what money can do" without looking at how a research proposal fit into an institution's larger academics goals. He also said the individual institutions should also drive their own research agendas.
"They don't need us telling them what to do," Rosenberg said.
Whipple and Gallagher also said they plan to propose that regents add overseeing the system's real estate holdings to the current investment committee in order to better track those investments. The changes to the research and to the investment committee will need to be approved by the full board at their September meeting.
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