Research in the Science Department

David DeMuth, Science, Valley City State University, ND

March 20, 2025

Research, for the typical VCSU faculty member, is an intellectual activity assigned to be a 10% effort in the standard 80:10:10 contract, with service carrying the same 10% weight. And it is teaching that is the predominant focus. If 40 hours of work per week were considered full-time effort, both research and service amount to an 8 hour weekly commitment. Considering this constraint, research is that thing which each faculty member commits 240 minutes of their workweek.

Individually each of us have a private regard for research, and some categories might evolve, with gender not evident, whereas age might indirectly be.  As we continue in the cycle of impactful academic programs, we hire new faculty with a preference on those with a terminal degree in their discipline. With recent hires, at least in Science, and presumed younger, most have a situational commitment to participating in Discovery Research. 

Discovery research presents its own constraints, access to a dedicated research space and lab gear, being among those. Science labs, like real estate, are all about “location, location, location” and gear is prohibitively expensive; and then there is maintenance and calibration. And yet there are examples where cutting-edge research is in sight at VCSU. 

For example in the area of toxicology, and high energy physics. In either case Collaborative Research is the feature.  Faculty join other faculty at Carnegie class R1 institutions, UND or NDSU, national centers, NIH, or national labs, Fermilab.  In these cases, a slice of a larger project can be distributed to a faculty member, who then shares that prestige with the campus, thus supporting a culture of research at VCSU. Moreover, that prestige has recruiting and retention merit for both students and faculty when acknowledged and well coordinated. 

As of recently, funding agencies such as the Dept. of Energy have smiled on the PUIs, HBCUs, and TCUs with new solicitations that include overhead dollars for the university that can be shared with departments, and faculty; noting a dollar distribution model needs development.

Constraining a faculty member’s research embrace might be in having no discipline peers, although transdisciplinarity has its features.  For example, one geologist or one entomologist or one physicist.  Collaborative research alongside technology makes up for some of this but there is nothing more progressive than having multiple specialists who can put their heads together in tackling hard problems, some of which could lead to patent, trademark, or copyright. 

An avenue being explored is bringing teaching-minded postdocs onto the campus who have a split appointment, first to participate in undergraduate-centric research, and second to teach courses alongside their primary faculty member who benefits from a course release. Gurgling on discipline specific teaching strategies extends ROI. Funding to support a postdoc could be realized by agency programs, and enhanced EDRF dollars that are on the horizon. 

Field research is another category that is represented at VCSU.  For example there is a long heritage of mussel population, fish population, and water quality studies.  These tend to be funded by conservation agencies, are generally summer activities, and afford undergraduate  participation. 

Several of the programs in the Science department have education affiliations, for example in chemistry and biology, where best shepherding those programs are faculty skilled at education as a discipline, a.k.a. EDD holders, where Action Research is predominant. These research studies might explore creativity exhibited in problem solving by undergraduates, where surveys are the data instrument, and when K12 are involved, studies are vetted by Institutional Research Boards.

Student-centric research, better known as Undergraduate Research, are generally engagements that extend over a semester (or two) where the student designs, proposes, conducts, and reports on a project under the mentorship of a VCSU faculty member. Any one undergraduate research project will likely require regular faculty involvement with that student, e.g., 4 hours per week. Undergraduate research is a different kind of classroom, highly impactful, but generally one student at a time, and where memories are made.

Course-Based Research includes program-specific capstone research and presentation, and so-called CUREs, that is Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences.  In both cases,  faculty members exert significant effort.

Transdisciplinary Research encourages faculty from multiple disciplines to engage, e.g., vDUNE, when last summer three CSSE faculty and three students were joined by one professional software engineer and one software enabled physicist to develop a virtual reality experience for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, an international and cutting-edge research project being built near Sturgis, South Dakota.

Supportive Research has faculty at VCSU reviewing grant proposals for regional and national agencies, such as the Department of Energy, an activity vital to honing their own ability to solicit grants successfully.

In each of these categories for research hosted by the Science Department Faculty, the common theme is engaging undergraduates.  Undergraduates have any number of reasons to join VCSU, these include programmatic, financial, regional, social, and personal. Often students prefer a campus where faculty know their name and who are vested in their success.

In other words, students who join VCSU might be surprised at the culture of research that exists in the Science Department, one testament is the walls of research posters that are displayed throughout the building. VCSU students and faculty have been gifted by the SOAR and UROP undergraduate research programs, and Science is always well represented.

It has been said that VCSU’s best students are as good as any university’s best students, but that we have fewer.  And that same regard applies to our faculty. Some are especially tuned for teaching, while others have an appetite and skill for research. Moreover, others knock service out of the park. 

With respect to contracts that encumber faculty to teaching, research, and service, keep in mind that each faculty member has gifts, some teaching, other researching, and as such with a more flexible load assignment that departs from the 80:10:10 standard, will a culture of research for students and faculty be better stoked.

Reference: Enhancing HEP research in predominantly undergraduate institutions and community colleges, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.11662