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by Joe Sullivan

UT has suffered a setback in its effort to augment the university’s research capabilities through collaboration with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That effort has focused initially on recruiting top scientists to a new Joint Institute for Computational Sciences that, while located on the ORNL campus, is a UT facility.

But the man who has been spearheading JICS’ start up, Thom Dunning, has announced that he is leaving to take a prestigious post at the University of Illinois. Dunning’s departure as JICS’ director will almost inevitably slow the process of filling eight newly created, but still vacant, UT faculty positions at the institute as a first step toward a goal of 20 or more over the next three years.

Illinois’ ability to lure Dunning to take the helm of its National Center for Supercomputing Applications also dramatizes the difficulties UT faces in trying to achieve its goal of becoming one of the nation’s top-tier research universities.

“When Thom Dunning came here two years ago [from the University of North Carolina], I felt we’d gotten the No. 1 draft choice in the country,” says computer science professor Jesse Poore, who has long been UT’s principal liaison with ORNL through what’s known as the Science Alliance. “But what Illinois had to offer was far more attractive than our situation. The center that he’ll run is well established, heavily funded by the National Science Foundation and has about 400 researchers,” Poore says.

The NCSA also boasts what is presently the nation’s most powerful supercomputer with a capacity of 35 teraflop. (A teraflop is a mind-boggling trillion calculations per second.) But ORNL is in the process of assembling a much more powerful, 250 teraflop machine at a cost of $250 million, and it’s supposed to serve as one of JICS’ primary drawing cards. Dunning has been stressing the importance of this awesome computational capacity to research everything from climate control to harnessing fusion energy. But the new JICS building that adjoins ORNL’s computer facility remains largely vacant.

Poore and ORNL’s associate director for computation sciences, Tom Zacharia, have been named JICS’s interim co-directors. And they intend to continue with recruiting efforts even while a search is underway for Dunning’s successor. “We had about 50 people in last month from other universities and national laboratories, so there’s a lot of interest,” Poore reports.

JICS is one of three joint institutes for which UT has gotten $25 million from the state for facilities in Oak Ridge that are intended to take advantage of everything ORNL has to offer. One of them, a Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences, will draw upon the national lab’s piece de resistance—the $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source that’s to be completed next year. But JINS is still in a formative stage, as is a Joint Institute for Biological Sciences.

In every case, operating funds remain in doubt, and the same holds true for other new research endeavors that UT would like to undertake. Chancellor Loren Crabtree estimates that the university’s Knoxville campus has lost about $20 million in operating funds over the past two years due to state funding cuts, and the pinch is pervasive.

Crabtree has been keen on bolstering UT’s chemistry department, which just happens to be new President John Petersen’s academic field. “We had a very distinguished chemist in as a candidate to head the department, and we wanted to hear what it would take to move us up to where we should be,” Crabtree related in an interview this past summer. The answer was $1.2 million, primarily in research support. “We don’t have the money, but chemistry is so important,” he said plaintively.

Crabtree is presently on a trip to China and couldn’t be reached for comment. But Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Anne Mayhew says that long time chemistry Professor Craig Barnes has subsequently been named chair of the department. “It became clear that we needed a good administrator, whereas the candidate Loren is referring to wanted to bring a research team with him, and we concluded that trying to hire someone who can be both a top-flight administrator and a distinguished scientist is unrealistic.”

Attracting more top-flight researchers—and the federal grants they can draw in—is going to take more research-support funding from the state. And the big question now is whether that funding will be forthcoming.

Gov. Phil Bredesen has been a strong exponent of strengthening UT’s research capabilities in general and its ties with ORNL in particular. And Petersen has observed that “I think he’s the best governor who’s been in office in any state I’ve been in terms of his understanding of higher education and what it can do for economic development and quality of life.”

But state revenues so far this fiscal year have been running well below projections, and if that trend continues, it will cut deeply into the budgetary base on which funding increases for next year depend. At the same time, it remains to be seen to what extent Bredesen’s TennCare reforms will succeed in clamping down on increases in a program that’s been consuming much of the state’s revenue growth over the past several years.

The Bredesen administration hasn’t yet issued any budgetary directions for the fiscal year ahead. But the executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, Rich Rhoda, says that “in our internal planning, we are making the assumption that there will be no new operating dollars.”

The ability to obtain some poses the sternest challenge of Petersen’s early tenure as UT’s president.

November 4, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 45 © 2004 Metro Pulse