the research department of a

About the Research Department

Our Research Department's high-quality academic and original research supports the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and the Bank's leadership as they address economic, finance, and public policy issues.

We also conduct public outreach and share data analysis with stakeholders System-wide and worldwide. We have the highest standards for our research, and we strive to recruit and retain top talent.

Our economists typically hold a Ph.D. in economics or finance from a U.S. university; many also have an international background. We hire some of our economists straight from top graduate programs. Others are former faculty (often tenured) at top schools.

Research Department Highlights (Aug. 2022–July 2023)

Review a roundup of recent seminars and publications generated by the Research Department.

• Journal Publications
• Research Seminars
• Working Papers

These economists are experts in a variety of subjects, including financial, labor, and consumer markets; banking regulation; regional and urban economics; and the behavior of the economy as a whole. They regularly publish their research as Bank working papers and in academic journals. They also make policy recommendations, write for the general public, and speak to business, government, and academic groups locally and globally.

We provide many resources to help our economists produce their high-quality research:

• High-performance computing
• Sensitive data and classified information
• Real-time collaboration opportunities with colleagues worldwide 
• Flexibility to accommodate an economist's ideas and body of work 
• Solutions tailored to each economist's needs
• A cohort of skilled research assistants and interns
• Editors, designers, librarians, and other experienced support staff

Additional Resources

• Find out more about our economists  and visiting scholars .
• View the Bank's large variety of working papers .
• Read the latest edition of Economic Insights, our quarterly journal for the general public.
• See a list of past  and upcoming conferences sponsored by the Bank and our partners.
• If you are interested in contributing to our mission, we encourage you to apply for one of our open positions .

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Department of Medicine

Research in the Department of Medicine

Johns Hopkins University is America’s first research university, and the Department of Medicine has been at the forefront of that research from the very beginning. The department was awarded more than 400 grants for over $150 million in funding last year alone, and we consistently rank among the top departments of medicine in annual funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

We facilitate an environment of innovation and collaboration to support novel approaches to the understanding, treatment and prevention of human disease. With some of the greatest basic and clinical scientists from across the globe, we promote an atmosphere of discovery and collaboration across the Department of Medicine and University divisions in fundamental, clinical and translational science that aides in the successes shared by our passionate faculty and staff.

Sub-Specialty Research

Addiction medicine.

Research focus:  attitudes toward patients with addiction; buprenorphine treatment; clinical excellence; contingency management; integrated HIV and hepatitis C treatment

• Research Centers
• Division website

Allergy and Clinical Immunology

Research focus:  peripheral nervous system in healthy and inflamed tissue; nerve inflammation interactions; airway refluxes; mechanisms of signal transduction; genetic epidemiology; gene environment and functional genetics; medical product and environmental allergy testing; urticaria and angioedema; primary immunodeficiency diseases (PID)

Research focus:  cardiac imaging; electrophysiology and arrhythmia; myocardial and heart failure; preventive cardiology and cardiovascular epidemiology; regenerative biology

Clinical Pharmacology

Research focus:  anti-HIV pharmacology; anti-infective pharmacology; anti-malarial pharmacology; anti-TB pharmacology; anti-trypanosome pharmacology; hospital system drug utilization

Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism

Research focus:  adrenal glands; endocrine bone disease; diabetes mellitus; reproductive endocrinology; metabolism; parathyroid; pituitary and hypothalamus glands; thyroid

Gastroenterology & Hepatology

Research focus:  early detection of pancreatic cancer; extracellular matrix (ECM) biology; GI biomarkers; inflammatory bowel disease and autoimmune liver diseases; inflammatory bowel disease genetics

General Internal Medicine

Research focus:  bioethics; cancer; cardiovascular disease; chronic kidney disease; depression and other mental illness; diabetes mellitus; health disparities; HIV/AIDS; hypertension; medical education; obesity; pharmacoepidemiology; substance abuse

Geriatric Medicine & Gerontology

Research focus:  biology of healthy aging; aging and health (COAH); health services; older Americans independence

Research focus:  aplastic anemia; sickle cell disease; myeloproliferative disorders; thrombotic disorders; blood diseases in young adults; venous thromboembolism; hematologic malignancies; hemophilia and other coagulation disorders

Infectious Diseases

Research focus:  AIDS; antibiotic management and resistance; environmental infectious diseases; hospital epidemiology and infection control; microbiome; sexually transmitted diseases and infections; transplant and oncology infectious diseases; tuberculosis; viral hepatitis

Molecular Medicine

Research focus:  epigenetic cause of human disease; epigenetics of cancer; addressing chance in the genome using mathematics; The Twins Study

Research focus:  glomerulonephritis; polycystic kidney disease; retroperitoneal fibrosis; kidney stones; HIV infection and kidney disease; secondary hypertension; thrombotic microangiopathy; lupus

Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine

Research focus:  acute lung injury/sepsis/critical care; adherence research; asthma; auto-immunity; COPD; cystic fibrosis; environmental exposures; epithelial biology; global health; health care disparities; HIV-related pulmonary disease; interstitial lung disease; interventional pulmonology; lung and airway mechanics; lung transplantation; mucosal immunology; pulmonary hypertension; respiratory failure associated with ALS and other neuromuscular disorders; sarcoidosis; sleep disordered breathing; vascular biology

Rheumatology

Research focus:  arthritis; scleroderma; vasculitis; general rheumatology; Sjogren’s syndrome; myositis; lupus; lyme disease; flow cytometry; bioassay

Vice Chairs for Research

For a full list of Department of Medicine Vice Chairs, click here .

Clifton Oragon Bingham, MD

• Director, Johns Hopkins Arthritis Center
• Professor of Medicine

Brian O'Rourke, PhD

• Robert L. Levy Professor in Cardiology

Stuart Campbell Ray, MD

• Vice Chair of Medicine for Data Integrity and Analytics, Department of Medicine

Research Administration

The Department of Medicine Research Administration & Support Team (RAST) is a resource for sponsored research that maintains compliance and integrity in award management, ensures excellent customer service and provides sponsored research training.

Becky Hanst

Grants & Contracts Administrator

Sagar Bhagwat

Grants & Contracts Manager Clinical Pharmacology Infectious Diseases

Christopher Blackledge

Grants & Contracts Manager Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism Hematology Nephrology

Julius Esguerra

Grants & Contracts Manager Geriatric Medicine & Gerontology Rheumatology

Rachel Morales

Grants & Contracts Manager Cardiology

Diana Reynolds

Grants & Contracts Manager Gastroenterology & Hepatology

Grants & Contracts Manager Clinical Immunology Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine

Elaine Thomas

Grants & Contracts Manager Pre-Award

Erica Wolfe

Rast responsibilities.

We partner with central administration offices, such as the Office of Research Administration  and  Sponsored Projects Shared Services , to ensure award processes run smoothly.

Award Responsibilities

• Review sponsored research applications and all sponsored awards forwarded to the Research Administration & Support Team (RAST)  for accuracy and compliance
• Submit grant applications and other submissions directly to sponsor or forward to the Office of Research Administration for further review/submission to sponsor, depending on proposal type and sponsor
• Act as a final point of contact with departmental faculty and sponsored staff relating to pre-award activity including grant/contract applications
• Provide hands-on training on pre-award submissions
• Act as a resource to answer pre-award questions on compliance
• Provide pre-award coverage for divisions that have vacancies or for faculty who do not have assigned sponsored support
• Act as a final point of contact with departmental faculty and sponsored staff relating to post-award activity including post-award administration of sponsored accounts and interaction with federal sponsors
• Post-award management of grants that come through the director’s office
• Provide post-award coverage for divisions that have vacancies or for faculty who do not have assigned sponsored support
• Provide post-award reports to make sure that divisions maintain focus on post-award project even during heavy deadline periods
• Analyze accounts and work with divisions and shared services to find solutions

Compliance Responsibilities

• Effort Compliance Manager directs effort process and monitoring for the entire department
• Act as resource for effort compliance, provides training on effort, finds solutions to effort issues in divisions
• Ensure grant administrators are informed of University, governmental and sponsor compliance policies to maintain fiscal responsibility of awards
• Facilitate Department of Medicine working groups and participate in School of Medicine working groups targeting specific sponsored issues and areas

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Research and Science

From fostering continued economic growth to adapting to the effects of climate change and addressing food security, the United States can continue to be a leader in global agriculture. Each day, the work of USDA scientists and researchers touches the lives of all Americans - from the farm field to the kitchen table and from the air we breathe to the energy that powers our country.

The challenges facing agriculture, natural resources, and conservation are immense and can be addressed through robust research enterprise and educational programs. USDA intramural and extramural science helps to protect, secure, and improve our food, agricultural and natural resources systems.

USDA Science and Research Strategy, 2023-2026: Cultivating Scientific Innovation

The “ USDA Science and Research Strategy, 2023-2026: Cultivating Scientific Innovation (PDF, 21.4 MB)” presents a near-term vision for transforming U.S. agriculture through science and innovation, and outlines USDA’s highest scientific priorities. The S&RS is a call to action for USDA partners, stakeholders, and customers to join the conversation and help identify innovative research strategies that lead to real-world, practical solutions that help farmers, producers, and communities thrive.

Learn more and engage below:

USDA Science and Research Strategy

AGARDA: A Vision for Disruptive Science to Confront Audacious Challenges

Agriculture Advanced Research and Development Authority (AGARDA) Implementation Strategy (PDF, 1.8 MB) is a framework outlining a new approach for delivering disruptive breakthrough discoveries for agriculture.

Strengthening Our Research System

USDA has refocused its science agencies to ensure the most effective and efficient use of its resources, while leveraging the strengths of our partners across the scientific community.

The Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) coordinates USDA research, education and Extension with scientists and researchers across the federal government and university and private partners, to make the best use of taxpayer investments. In 2012, OCS continued focus on the Research, Education and Economics Action Plan (PDF, 486 KB) and identified seven priority research topics:

• Global Food Supply and Security
• Climate and Energy Needs
• Sustainable Use of Natural Resources
• Nutrition and Childhood Obesity
• Food Safety
• Education and Science Literacy
• Rural-urban Interdependence/Rural Prosperity

The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) conducts research to develop and transfer solutions to agricultural problems of high national priority.

The Economic Research Service (ERS) , through science-based economic research and analysis, informs public policy and other decisions about agriculture, food, rural development, and environmental challenges.

The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) conducts hundreds of surveys every year and prepares reports covering virtually every aspect of U.S. agriculture.

The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) supports research, education and Extension programs in the Land-Grant University System and other partner organizations.

Enhancing the Productivity of American Agriculture and Ensuring the Safety of our Food Supply

USDA invests in research, development, and outreach of new varieties and technologies to mitigate animal/plant diseases and increase productivity, sustainability, and product quality. USDA research has supported America's farmers and ranchers in their work to produce a safe and abundant food supply for over 100 years. This work has helped feed the nation and sustain an agricultural trade surplus since the 1960s.

An additional focus is to establish more sustainable systems that enhance crop and animal health. Our scientists and university partners have revealed the genetic blueprints of a host of plants and animals including the genomes of apples, pigs, and turkeys, and in 2012, they furthered understanding of the tomato, bean, wheat and barley genomes -- key drivers in developing the resilience of those crops to feed growing populations.

NASS has developed animated U.S. crop progress and topsoil moisture maps , along with other resources, to help experts assess farmland data. USDA researchers also created the Maize Genome Database, an important tool to help farmers improve traits in a crop vital to the world. Meeting growing global demand for food, fiber, and biofuel requires robust investment in agricultural research and development (R&D) from both public and private sectors. USDA is a leader in remote sensing and mapping to visualize data in support of agricultural policy and business decision making as well as program operation. We ranked first worldwide among research institutions publishing on priority diseases in animal health including salmonellosis, avian influenza , mycobacterial disease, coccidiosis, campylobacterosis, mastitis and others.

USDA conducts and supports science that informs decisions and policies contributing to a safe food supply and the reduction of foodborne hazards. Our scientists found the primary site where the virus that causes foot-and-mouth disease begins infection in cattle and developed an improved vaccine against the disease. They are also working on new strategies to control mites and other major honey bee problems such as colony collapse disorder .

Improving Nutrition and Confronting Obesity

USDA builds the evidence base for food-based and physical activity strategies and develops effective education activities to promote health and reduce malnutrition and obesity in children and high-risk populations. For example, ARS evaluated school characteristics associated with healthier or less healthy food preparation practices and offerings and found that the school nutrition environment could be improved by requiring food service managers to hold nutrition-related college degrees, pass a food service training program, and by participating in a school-based nutrition program such as USDA Team Nutrition .

USDA-supported science is investigating the causes of childhood obesity so that our country can address the epidemic. In these efforts, USDA supports nutrition education programs and encourages Americans to consume more nutritious foods like fruits and vegetables. Our scientists are part of an international team that has found a way to boost the nutritional value of broccoli, tomatoes and corn, and have worked to find ways to bolster the nutritional content of other staple crops like oats and rice. USDA research has supported these efforts, showing how healthy foods can often cost less than foods that are high in saturated fat, added sugar and/or sodium.

In 2013, USDA updated the national assessment of urban and rural food deserts - low-income areas with limited access to affordable and nutritious food - and provided information on the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics that distinguish food deserts from other areas, for decision-makers and stakeholders concerned about access to healthy foods.

Conserving Natural Resources and Combating Climate Change

USDA develops and delivers science-based knowledge that empowers farmers, foresters, ranchers, landowners, resource managers, policymakers, and Federal agencies to manage the risks, challenges, and opportunities of climate variability, and that informs decision-making and improves practices in environmental conservation.

Our scientists are developing rice and corn crops that are drought- and flood-resistant and helping to improve the productivity of soil, as well as production systems that require increasing smaller amounts of pesticides or none at all.

Vegetation indices contained in VegScape have proven useful for assessing crop condition and identifying the aerial extent of floods, drought, major weather anomalies, and vulnerabilities of early/late season crops. This tool allows users to monitor and track weather anomalies' effects on crops in near real time and compare this information to historical data on localized levels or across States.

Additionally, our researchers have examined the potential impacts of a suite of climate scenarios on U.S. crop production. Studies like these will help policymakers, farmers, industry leaders and others better understand and adapt to a changing climate on America's crop production.

Our researchers created i-Tree , urban forest management software to help cities understand the value of urban trees through carbon sequestration, erosion protection, energy conservation and water filtration, and since 2009 have continued building on the success of the tool and expanding its use. Our scientists are conducting research on uses of wood, helping companies meet green building design standards and creating jobs using forest products. We have also worked with Major League Baseball to reduce the occurrence of broken baseball bats.

USDA supports families managing through tough economic times by helping residents save energy at home and conserve water, with a program run by Cooperative Extension and our land-grant university partners. Cooperative Extension-affiliated volunteer monitoring programs have engaged citizens in water monitoring to better understand the effects of climate change and/or aquatic invasive species on local waters. Collectively, these programs interacted with hundreds of local, State, and Federal partners. The programs help citizens detect the presence of invasive species and harmful algal blooms.

Science Education and Extension

USDA recognizes the importance of recruiting, cultivating, and developing the next generation of scientists, leaders, and a highly skilled workforce for food, agriculture, natural resources, forestry, environmental systems, and life sciences.

The NIFA interagency agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service leverages technology and innovation and involves youth in STEM outreach and exposure. Youth participants developed science process skills related to using GIS and research design, analyzing and interpreting data, and reporting findings to the community which has enabled them to become better consumers of science and citizens capable of making wise STEM policy choices.

USDA strives to provide effective research, education, and extension activities that inform public and private decision-making in support of rural and community development . NASS holds outreach events throughout the Census cycle with underserved and minority and disadvantaged farming groups to promote participation in the Census of Agriculture . With funding and support from NIFA, many Tribal Colleges are offering Reservation citizens training ranging from basic financial literacy to business start-up and marketing information so that families not only survive, but thrive.

In addition, the ERS Atlas of Rural and Small Town America brings together over 80 demographic, economic, and agricultural statistics for every county in all 50 states and assembles statistics in four broad categories -- people, jobs, agriculture, and geography.

Research and Science Centers and Databases

• Agricultural Network Information Center (AGNIC)
• Agricultural Online Access (AGRICOLA)
• Alternative Farming Systems Information Center (AFSIC)
• Animal Welfare Information Center (AWIC)
• Current Research Information Center (CRIS)
• Digital Desktop (DigiTop) for Employees
• Food and Nutrition Assistance Research Database
• Food and Nutrition Information Center
• Production, Supply and Distribution Online (PSD Online) Database
• Rural Information Center
• Water and Agricultural Information Center

Development Research Group

• Publications
• Initiatives

The Development Research Group at a Glance

Located within the  Development Economics Vice Presidency , the Development Research Group is the World Bank's principal research department. With its cross-cutting expertise on a broad range of topics and countries, the department is one of the most influential centers of development research in the world.

Learn more about the Development Research Group ›

DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH

International trade has historically been a force for development and poverty reduction. But trade is increasingly viewed as contributing to inequality and risk, depleting natural resources, and threatening the environment. To better understand the role of international trade on development outcomes and their sustainability and inclusivity, the World Bank and the editorial team from the  Journal of International Economics  are hosting a research conference in Washington, DC on September 12-13, 2024.

Note: The call for papers is now closed. General registration will open on or around August 1, 2024.

• Event Website

DaTax conducts cutting-edge analytical work with micro tax data, aimed at supporting the development of equitable and sustainable public finance systems. The partners work in close collaboration with tax administrations and Ministries of Finance in over 15 developing countries globally. The analysis feeds directly into policy design and helps build partner countries’ analytical capacity.

Through a combination of micro evidence—the behavior of taxpayers, firms, workers, and consumers—and macro evidence, DaTax studies macroeconomic outcomes and cross-country patterns across stages of development. 

Land institutions and policies will be critical to help African countries respond to the challenges of climate change, urban expansion, structural transformation, and gender equality. Yet, many African land registries command little trust due to poor performance and wealth bias in service delivery. This publication draws on a wealth of data, examples, and studies from Africa and beyond to show that regulatory and institutional reforms can harness countries' potential by improving the quality, coverage, usefulness, and sustainability of documented land rights.

• Launch Event (May 13)
• Publication

While countries increasingly commit to pricing greenhouse gases directly through carbon taxes or emissions trading systems, indirect forms of carbon pricing—such as fuel excise taxes and fuel subsidy reforms—remain important factors affecting mitigation incentives. In  Measuring Total Carbon Pricing , a methodology is developed for calculating a total carbon price applied to carbon emissions in a sector, a fuel, or the whole economy. The methodology is now being deployed in a growing set of analyses to better understand critical issues like energy subsidy reform and  global carbon pricing .

• Journal Article
• Policy Research Working Paper
• ESMAP Technical Report | Total Carbon Pricing for Energy Consumption: The Importance of Energy Taxes and Subsidies

Latest Working Papers

Research newsletter.

Accelerating Digital Development

Digital technologies offer the possibility of a new era in development. Investing in digital infrastructure and skills will be critical for countries that hope to realize the benefits.

Food and Nutrition Security

What will it take for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to develop systems that can sustain high-quality nutrition, even during economic shocks?

The Future of Migration and Forced Displacement

Globally, approximately 184 million people live outside their country of citizenship. Human mobility will increasingly be driven by factors like climate change, conflict, divergent demographic trends, and income ...

Subscribe to the Research Newsletter

Sign up to receive a monthly summary of the latest research on a key theme in development, plus updates on our upcoming events, blogs, publications, and other new content.

• Access Archived Issues

World Development Report 2018: What has the World Bank’s flagship report on learning achieved?

Taxation for Development: Rethinking Fair and Efficient Tax Systems for the Next ...

In the past ten years, tax research has expanded markedly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Novel, high-quality, digital-administrative data has combined with governments’ openness to evaluating fiscal policy ...

Self-Arming or Self-Harming? Assessing Trade Policies in Low- and Middle-Income ...

Recent global challenges like the pandemic, rising geopolitical tensions, and climate change have thrust trade policy back into the spotlight. How are low- and middle-income countries responding?

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Labour market trends and outlook, macroeconomic policies and jobs, work, incomes and equity, globalization and labour markets, changing world of work, policy evaluation, effective labour institutions, international labour review.

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What Is a Research Associate? Definition, Duties, Career Path

What Is a Research Associate?

A research associate typically works within a research department of an investment bank or asset management firm to provide helpful data to the decision-makers who buy and sell securities for the firm. A research associate can plan, organize, and conduct research about industries, sectors, individual companies, markets, various investment vehicles , and economics.

Key Takeaways

• A research associate works in a research department of an investment bank, asset management firm, or other financial services company to gather, organize, and synthesize data to support decision-makers in the firm's sales and trading function.
• An individual who works as a research associate can become an expert in specific areas or be utilized as a generalist to cover a broad range of products, markets, and industries.
• A research associate can climb vertically toward becoming a senior analyst or research director, or they may move laterally inside or outside an organization.

Understanding the Role of Investment Research

Most large investment banks have in-house research departments that support their sales and trading efforts. A sell-side firm may have several research groups according to the company's different investment products—for example, stocks, corporate bonds, derivatives, and so on.

A firm's research professionals provide critical decision-making information to its salesmen and traders that substantiate the financial products they sell to institutional investors. A firm's research often provides specific buy, sell, and hold recommendations along with their rationale.

A key product of a research department is its written research; whether that takes the form of scrawled notes to the trading desk or a formal published research report, along with appropriate financial models, that goes out to the buy-side . Usually, it's a combination of both and each format plays a specific role in providing time-sensitive analysis that supports decision-making.

What Does A Research Associate Do?

A research associate's responsibilities can vary depending on the size and needs of the organization. The end purpose of the job, however, is to provide helpful information to the decision-makers. A research associate could gather data from primary and secondary sources; organize and analyze this material, and draft outlines for their superiors.

If an equity research associate has had at least one year of experience at the firm, they might begin to conduct fundamental company analysis with the goal of generating actionable information from the data. A research associate can become an expert in specific areas or be utilized as a generalist to cover a broad range of products, markets, and industries.

A firm's research department provides critical time-sensitive analyses of companies, industries, markets, asset classes, and economics to decision-makers and traders on both the buy- and sell-sides.

Job Skills and Requirements

Because the end product of a research department is written research, it's critical that a research associate be able to write well. The role usually requires a bachelor's or master's degree in economics, business, or finance, as well as facility with numbers and the ability to distill large amounts of data and communicate it effectively to others.

Other skills would come into play as the individual advances in the role of research associate. For example, if they end up attending client meetings, they might need good listening, notetaking, and intersocial abilities. If they travel for pre- initial public offering (IPO) roadshows , they would need good presentation and sales skills, and so on.

Career Path of a Research Associate

Depending on an organization's hierarchical structure, a research associate can be at the same level as a research assistant or above it, and at the same level or below a research analyst . The research associate generally spends at least two years at that level before moving up the ladder, whether to a senior research associate role or research analyst position (most organizations place the analyst position above the associate position).

By accumulating more experience, a research associate can climb vertically toward becoming a senior analyst or research director, or they may move laterally inside or outside an organization. Inside the company, for example, a seasoned research professional who does not aspire to become head of research could move to a product group in a marketing role, or to a different part of the firm altogether.

It's also not unheard of for a research associate to decide that they prefer trading instead of research. In the case of a research associate on the sell-side, a career jump to the buy-side as an analyst also could offer potential advancement.

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Building an R&D strategy for modern times

The global investment in research and development (R&D) is staggering. In 2019 alone, organizations around the world spent $2.3 trillion on R&D—the equivalent of roughly 2 percent of global GDP—about half of which came from industry and the remainder from governments and academic institutions. What’s more, that annual investment has been growing at approximately 4 percent per year over the past decade. 1 2.3 trillion on purchasing-power-parity basis; 2019 global R&D funding forecast , Supplement, R&D Magazine, March 2019, rdworldonline.com.

While the pharmaceutical sector garners much attention due to its high R&D spending as a percentage of revenues, a comparison based on industry profits shows that several industries, ranging from high tech to automotive to consumer, are putting more than 20 percent of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) back into innovation research (Exhibit 1).

What do organizations expect to get in return? At the core, they hope their R&D investments yield the critical technology from which they can develop new products, services, and business models. But for R&D to deliver genuine value, its role must be woven centrally into the organization’s mission. R&D should help to both deliver and shape corporate strategy, so that it develops differentiated offerings for the company’s priority markets and reveals strategic options, highlighting promising ways to reposition the business through new platforms and disruptive breakthroughs.

Yet many enterprises lack an R&D strategy that has the necessary clarity, agility, and conviction to realize the organization’s aspirations. Instead of serving as the company’s innovation engine, R&D ends up isolated from corporate priorities, disconnected from market developments, and out of sync with the speed of business. Amid a growing gap in performance  between those that innovate successfully and those that do not, companies wishing to get ahead and stay ahead of competitors need a robust R&D strategy that makes the most of their innovation investments. Building such a strategy takes three steps: understanding the challenges that often work as barriers to R&D success, choosing the right ingredients for your strategy, and then pressure testing it before enacting it.

Overcoming the barriers to successful R&D

The first step to building an R&D strategy is to understand the four main challenges that modern R&D organizations face:

Innovation cycles are accelerating. The growing reliance on software and the availability of simulation and automation technologies have caused the cost of experimentation to plummet while raising R&D throughput. The pace of corporate innovation is further spurred by the increasing emergence of broadly applicable technologies, such as digital and biotech, from outside the walls of leading industry players.

But incumbent corporations are only one part of the equation. The trillion dollars a year that companies spend on R&D is matched by the public sector. Well-funded start-ups, meanwhile, are developing and rapidly scaling innovations that often threaten to upset established business models or steer industry growth into new areas. Add increasing investor scrutiny of research spending, and the result is rising pressure on R&D leaders to quickly show results for their efforts.

R&D lacks connection to the customer. The R&D group tends to be isolated from the rest of the organization. The complexity of its activities and its specialized lexicon make it difficult for others to understand what the R&D function really does. That sense of working inside a “black box” often exists even within the R&D organization. During a meeting of one large company’s R&D leaders, a significant portion of the discussion focused on simply getting everyone up to speed on what the various divisions were doing, let alone connecting those efforts to the company’s broader goals.

Given the challenges R&D faces in collaborating with other functions, going one step further and connecting with customers becomes all the more difficult. While many organizations pay lip service to customer-centric development, their R&D groups rarely get the opportunity to test products directly with end users. This frequently results in market-back product development that relies on a game of telephone via many intermediaries about what the customers want and need.

Projects have few accountability metrics. R&D groups in most sectors lack effective mechanisms to measure and communicate progress; the pharmaceutical industry, with its standard pipeline for new therapeutics that provides well-understood metrics of progress and valuation implications, is the exception, not the rule. When failure is explained away as experimentation and success is described in terms of patents, rather than profits, corporate leaders find it hard to quantify R&D’s contribution.

Yet proven metrics exist  to effectively measure progress and outcomes. A common challenge we observe at R&D organizations, ranging from automotive to chemical companies, is how to value the contribution of a single component that is a building block of multiple products. One specialty-chemicals company faced this challenge in determining the value of an ingredient it used in its complex formulations. It created categorizations to help develop initial business cases and enable long-term tracking. This allowed pragmatic investment decisions at the start of projects and helped determine the value created after their completion.

Even with outcomes clearly measured, the often-lengthy period between initial investment and finished product can obscure the R&D organization’s performance. Yet, this too can be effectively managed by tracking the overall value and development progress of the pipeline so that the organization can react and, potentially, promptly reorient both the portfolio and individual projects within it.

Incremental projects get priority. Our research indicates that incremental projects account for more than half of an average company’s R&D investment, even though bold bets and aggressive reallocation  of the innovation portfolio deliver higher rates of success. Organizations tend to favor “safe” projects with near-term returns—such as those emerging out of customer requests—that in many cases do little more than maintain existing market share. One consumer-goods company, for example, divided the R&D budget among its business units, whose leaders then used the money to meet their short-term targets rather than the company’s longer-term differentiation and growth objectives.

Focusing innovation solely around the core business may enable a company to coast for a while—until the industry suddenly passes it by. A mindset that views risk as something to be avoided rather than managed can be unwittingly reinforced by how the business case is measured. Transformational projects at one company faced a higher internal-rate-of-return hurdle than incremental R&D, even after the probability of success had been factored into their valuation, reducing their chances of securing funding and tilting the pipeline toward initiatives close to the core.

As organizations mature, innovation-driven growth becomes increasingly important, as their traditional means of organic growth, such as geographic expansion and entry into untapped market segments, diminish. To succeed, they need to develop R&D strategies equipped for the modern era that treat R&D not as a cost center but as the growth engine it can become.

Would you like to learn more about our Strategy & Corporate Finance Practice ?

Choosing the ingredients of a winning r&d strategy.

Given R&D’s role as the innovation driver that advances the corporate agenda, its guiding strategy needs to link board-level priorities with the technologies that are the organization’s focus (Exhibit 2). The R&D strategy must provide clarity and commitment to three central elements: what we want to deliver, what we need to deliver it, and how we will deliver it.

What we want to deliver. To understand what a company wants to and can deliver, the R&D, commercial, and corporate-strategy functions need to collaborate closely, with commercial and corporate-strategy teams anchoring the R&D team on the company’s priorities and the R&D team revealing what is possible. The R&D strategy and the corporate strategy must be in sync while answering questions such as the following: At the highest level, what are the company’s goals? Which of these will require R&D in order to be realized? In short, what is the R&D organization’s purpose?

Bringing the two strategies into alignment is not as easy as it may seem. In some companies, what passes for corporate strategy is merely a five-year business plan. In others, the corporate strategy is detailed but covers only three to five years—too short a time horizon to guide R&D, especially in industries such as pharma or semiconductors where the product-development cycle is much longer than that. To get this first step right, corporate-strategy leaders should actively engage with R&D. That means providing clarity where it is lacking and incorporating R&D feedback that may illuminate opportunities, such as new technologies that unlock growth adjacencies for the company or enable completely new business models.

Secondly, the R&D and commercial functions need to align on core battlegrounds and solutions. Chief technology officers want to be close to and shape the market by delivering innovative solutions that define new levels of customer expectations. Aligning R&D strategy provides a powerful forum for identifying those opportunities by forcing conversations about customer needs and possible solutions that, in many companies, occur only rarely. Just as with the corporate strategy alignment, the commercial and R&D teams need to clearly articulate their aspirations by asking questions such as the following: Which markets will make or break us as a company? What does a winning product or service look like for customers?

When defining these essential battlegrounds, companies should not feel bound by conventional market definitions based on product groups, geographies, or customer segments. One agricultural player instead defined its markets by the challenges customers faced that its solutions could address. For example, drought resistance was a key battleground no matter where in the world it occurred. That framing clarified the R&D–commercial strategy link: if an R&D project could improve drought resistance, it was aligned to the strategy.

The dialogue between the R&D, commercial, and strategy functions cannot stop once the R&D strategy is set. Over time, leaders of all three groups should reexamine the strategic direction and continuously refine target product profiles as customer needs and the competitive landscape evolve.

What we need to deliver it. This part of the R&D strategy determines what capabilities and technologies the R&D organization must have in place to bring the desired solutions to market. The distinction between the two is subtle but important. Simply put, R&D capabilities are the technical abilities to discover, develop, or scale marketable solutions. Capabilities are unlocked by a combination of technologies and assets, and focus on the outcomes. Technologies, however, focus on the inputs—for example, CRISPR is a technology that enables the genome-editing capability.

This delineation protects against the common pitfall of the R&D organization fixating on components of a capability instead of the capability itself—potentially missing the fact that the capability itself has evolved. Consider the dawn of the digital age: in many engineering fields, a historical reliance on talent (human number crunchers) was suddenly replaced by the need for assets (computers). Those who focused on hiring the fastest mathematicians were soon overtaken by rivals who recognized the capability provided by emerging technologies.

The simplest way to identify the needed capabilities is to go through the development processes of priority solutions step by step—what will it take to produce a new product or feature? Being exhaustive is not the point; the goal is to identify high-priority capabilities, not to log standard operating procedures.

Prioritizing capabilities is a critical but often contentious aspect of developing an R&D strategy. For some capabilities, being good is sufficient. For others, being best in class is vital because it enables a faster path to market or the development of a better product than those of competitors. Take computer-aided design (CAD), which is used to design and prototype engineering components in numerous industries, such as aerospace or automotive. While companies in those sectors need that capability, it is unlikely that being the best at it will deliver a meaningful advantage. Furthermore, organizations should strive to anticipate which capabilities will be most important in the future, not what has mattered most to the business historically.

Once capabilities are prioritized, the R&D organization needs to define what being “good” and “the best” at them will mean over the course of the strategy. The bar rises rapidly in many fields. Between 2009 and 2019, the cost of sequencing a genome dropped 150-fold, for example. 2 Kris A. Wetterstrand, “DNA sequencing costs: Data,” NHGRI Genome Sequencing Program (GSP), August 25, 2020, genome.gov. Next, the organization needs to determine how to develop, acquire, or access the needed capabilities. The decision of whether to look internally or externally is crucial. An automatic “we can build it better” mindset diminishes the benefits of specialization and dilutes focus. Additionally, the bias to building everything in-house can cut off or delay access to the best the world has to offer—something that may be essential for high-priority capabilities. At Procter & Gamble, it famously took the clearly articulated aspiration of former CEO A. G. Lafley to break the company’s focus on in-house R&D and set targets for sourcing innovation externally. As R&D organizations increasingly source capabilities externally, finding partners and collaborating with them effectively is becoming a critical capability in its own right.

How we will do it. The choices of operating model and organizational design will ultimately determine how well the R&D strategy is executed. During the strategy’s development, however, the focus should be on enablers that represent cross-cutting skills and ways of working. A strategy for attracting, developing, and retaining talent is one common example.

Another is digital enablement, which today touches nearly every aspect of what the R&D function does. Artificial intelligence can be used at the discovery phase to identify emerging market needs or new uses of existing technology. Automation and advanced analytics approaches to experimentation can enable high throughput screening at a small scale and distinguish the signal from the noise. Digital (“in silico”) simulations are particularly valuable when physical experiments are expensive or dangerous. Collaboration tools are addressing the connectivity challenges common among geographically dispersed project teams. They have become indispensable in bringing together existing collaborators, but the next horizon is to generate the serendipity of chance encounters that are the hallmark of so many innovations.

Testing your R&D strategy

Developing a strategy for the R&D organization entails some unique challenges that other functions do not face. For one, scientists and engineers have to weigh considerations beyond their core expertise, such as customer, market, and economic factors. Stakeholders outside R&D labs, meanwhile, need to understand complex technologies and development processes and think along much longer time horizons than those to which they are accustomed.

For an R&D strategy to be robust and comprehensive enough to serve as a blueprint to guide the organization, it needs to involve stakeholders both inside and outside the R&D group, from leading scientists to chief commercial officers. What’s more, its definition of capabilities, technologies, talent, and assets should become progressively more granular as the strategy is brought to life at deeper levels of the R&D organization. So how can an organization tell if its new strategy passes muster? In our experience, McKinsey’s ten timeless tests of strategy  apply just as well to R&D strategy as to corporate and business-unit strategies. The following two tests are the most important in the R&D context:

• Does the organization’s strategy tap the true source of advantage? Too often, R&D organizations conflate technical necessity (what is needed to develop a solution) with strategic importance (distinctive capabilities that allow an organization to develop a meaningfully better solution than those of their competitors). It is also vital for organizations to regularly review their answers to this question, as capabilities that once provided differentiation can become commoditized and no longer serve as sources of advantage.
• Does the organization’s strategy balance commitment-rich choices with flexibility and learning? R&D strategies may have relatively long time horizons but that does not mean they should be insulated from changes in the outside world and never revisited. Companies should establish technical, regulatory, or other milestones that serve as clear decision points for shifting resources to or away from certain research areas. Such milestones can also help mark progress and gauge whether strategy execution is on track.

Additionally, the R&D strategy should be simply and clearly communicated to other functions within the company and to external stakeholders. To boost its clarity, organizations might try this exercise: distill the strategy into a set of fill-in-the-blank components that define, first, how the world will evolve and how the company plans to refocus accordingly (for example, industry trends that may lead the organization to pursue new target markets or segments); next, the choices the R&D function will make in order to support the company’s new focus (which capabilities will be prioritized and which de-emphasized); and finally, how the R&D team will execute the strategy in terms of concrete actions and milestones. If a company cannot fit the exercise on a single page, it has not sufficiently synthesized the strategy—as the famed physicist Richard Feynman observed, the ultimate test of comprehension is the ability to convey something to others in a simple manner.

Cascading the strategy down through the R&D organization will further reinforce its impact. For example, asking managers to communicate the strategy to their subordinates will deepen their own understanding. A useful corollary is that those hearing the strategy for the first time are introduced to it by their immediate supervisors rather than more distant R&D leaders. One R&D group demonstrated the broad benefits of this communication model: involving employees in developing and communicating the R&D strategy helped it double its Organizational Health Index  strategic clarity score, which measures one of the four “power practices”  highly connected to organizational performance.

R&D represents a massive innovation investment, but as companies confront globalized competition, rapidly changing customer needs, and technological shifts coming from an ever-wider range of fields, they are struggling to deliver on R&D’s full potential. A clearly articulated R&D strategy that supports and informs the corporate strategy is necessary to maximize the innovation investment and long-term company value.

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Why we need a research department

Pinelopi goldberg.

After a brief hiatus, the office of the Chief Economist of the World Bank Group was reunited last week with DEC, the well-known Research Department of the World Bank. This led me to reflect on a question often posed to policy institutions as well as the private sector: Why do we need research departments outside academia?    Before attempting to answer this question, it is worth noting that research departments are common in top firms in the private sector. By research, I do not mean simple data gathering and processing, but rather the creation of original, innovative insights.  AT&T famously had Bell Labs.  Technology leaders from IBM to Microsoft to Amazon, Facebook, and Google have all funded basic research. Google has Google X, despite being located only a few miles from Stanford.  A strong research lab is a sign of company health and power.  Conversely, the shrinking of the research department often signals the demise of the company. And, of course, the phenomenon is not confined to tech.   The fact that these highly efficient companies choose to spend millions to support research departments reinforces the puzzle: Why not focus on engineering and application of knowledge and outsource the creation of fundamental knowledge, of primary research, to academia?

Many explanations have been suggested in the literature. One is prestige. Another is that to attract top, entrepreneurial staff, one needs to give them the freedom and independence associated with basic research. A further reason is that, occasionally, great things come out of these research departments that propel companies to the knowledge stratosphere and create enormous public goods. The transistor, laser, and UNIX are just a subset of Bell Labs’ storied achievements.   Closer to home, some of the most important public goods associated with the World Bank originated in DEC. One of the main objectives of the World Bank is to eliminate extreme poverty. But we would not even know how to measure poverty without the innovative work of DEC on this topic ( online tool , latest report ). Not only did DEC provide an analytical framework for measuring poverty, it also contributed to data collected within the ICP project and used widely today to estimate purchasing power parities (PPP) for the world’s economies. The Doing Business Report , one of the most influential products of the World Bank, is part of DEC. Financial inclusion , a household term today, is intimately connected with DEC research that started more than a decade ago .  More recently, DEC developed the analytical framework underlying the Human Capital Index . In all these cases, DEC, while attempting to answer basic research questions, identified data gaps and articulated strategic priorities that led to the provision of important public goods.  And this only scratches the surface of the myriad contributions that DEC has made over the years.   Research is by its nature uncertain. The dominant cost of research is the time and effort spent on projects that have long gestation periods and may not pan out. Therefore, patience and tolerance of failure are pre-conditions for success.  But the long-term payoffs of these high-risk, high-return bets justify the expenditures.   Last but not least, sound policy-making requires sharp and structured thinking. The traits honed in basic research, creativity, independent thinking, careful hypothesis formulation and testing, when paired with experience translate to invaluable wisdom that could and should guide policy.  An in-house research department is better placed than outside academics to inform – and be informed by – the day-to-day operational work of its home institution. As Olivier Blanchard, the prominent macroeconomist and previous Chief Economic Counselor of the IMF tweeted last month: “Central Banks have large research departments. Ministries of Finance typically do not even have a research department (with the result that research on monetary policy is much more developed than research on fiscal (macro) policy. Why?”   So, which of the above reasons is the most compelling for justifying the existence of a premier research department at the World Bank? My answer: All of the above!

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• Fighting Human Trafficking Through Research

Research Inroads

U.s. government-funded research.

Research is an integral vehicle for enhancing the U.S. government’s understanding of the multifaceted nature of human trafficking and guiding its anti-trafficking policies and programs. Research has also led the anti-trafficking community to rethink existing assumptions and examine new approaches to combat human trafficking. The TIP Office supports evidence-based research that identifies effective strategies for combating this crime.

Commitment To Fighting Human Trafficking Through Research

Over the last decade the U.S. government has funded research focused on labor and sex trafficking in every global area. There has been research on a myriad of topics related to human trafficking, including victim services, law enforcement actions, and methods of prevention. There have also been significant research evaluation studies to measure program effectiveness, impact, and potential for replication. Research has begun to make inroads and close knowledge gaps in our understanding about human trafficking.

• For example, Department of Justice funded research has begun to track trafficking within the United States and has uncovered effective techniques for both finding victims and improving law enforcement responses to these victims.
• The Department of State, for instance, has funded IOM’s Counter-Trafficking Module Database, leading to greater analysis of evolving trends. These trends include the growing recognition of trafficking of men, greater identification of an older victim population, and an increased awareness of forced labor cases.
• The U.S. government continues to fund qualified organizations through grants and cooperative agreements. U.S. government agencies periodically seek proposals from qualified U.S. organizations, researchers, and academic institutions to conduct research on human trafficking.

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research and development , in industry , two intimately related processes by which new products and new forms of old products are brought into being through technological innovation .

Research and development, a phrase unheard of in the early part of the 20th century, has since become a universal watchword in industrialized nations. The concept of research is as old as science; the concept of the intimate relationship between research and subsequent development, however, was not generally recognized until the 1950s. Research and development is the beginning of most systems of industrial production. The innovations that result in new products and new processes usually have their roots in research and have followed a path from laboratory idea, through pilot or prototype production and manufacturing start-up, to full-scale production and market introduction. The foundation of any innovation is an invention . Indeed, an innovation might be defined as the application of an invention to a significant market need. Inventions come from research—careful, focused, sustained inquiry, frequently trial and error. Research can be either basic or applied, a distinction that was established in the first half of the 20th century.

Basic research is defined as the work of scientists and others who pursue their investigations without conscious goals, other than the desire to unravel the secrets of nature. In modern programs of industrial research and development, basic research (sometimes called pure research) is usually not entirely “pure”; it is commonly directed toward a generalized goal, such as the investigation of a frontier of technology that promises to address the problems of a given industry. An example of this is the research being done on gene splicing or cloning in pharmaceutical company laboratories.

Applied research carries the findings of basic research to a point where they can be exploited to meet a specific need, while the development stage of research and development includes the steps necessary to bring a new or modified product or process into production. In Europe , the United States , and Japan the unified concept of research and development has been an integral part of economic planning , both by government and by private industry.

The first organized attempt to harness scientific skill to communal needs took place in the 1790s, when the young revolutionary government in France was defending itself against most of the rest of Europe. The results were remarkable. Explosive shells, the semaphore telegraph, the captive observation balloon, and the first method of making gunpowder with consistent properties all were developed during this period.

The lesson was not learned permanently, however, and another half century was to pass before industry started to call on the services of scientists to any serious extent. At first the scientists consisted of only a few gifted individuals. Robert W. Bunsen, in Germany, advised on the design of blast furnaces. William H. Perkin, in England, showed how dyes could be synthesized in the laboratory and then in the factory. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), in Scotland, supervised the manufacture of telecommunication cables. In the United States, Leo H. Baekeland, a Belgian, produced Bakelite, the first of the plastics. There were inventors, too, such as John B. Dunlop, Samuel Morse, and Alexander Graham Bell , who owed their success more to intuition , skill, and commercial acumen than to scientific understanding.

While industry in the United States and most of western Europe was still feeding on the ideas of isolated individuals, in Germany a carefully planned effort was being mounted to exploit the opportunities that scientific advances made possible. Siemens, Krupp, Zeiss, and others were establishing laboratories and, as early as 1900, employed several hundred people on scientific research. In 1870 the Physicalische Technische Reichsanstalt (Imperial Institute of Physics and Technology) was set up to establish common standards of measurement throughout German industry. It was followed by the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (later renamed the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science), which provided facilities for scientific cooperation between companies.

In the United States, the Cambria Iron Company set up a small laboratory in 1867, as did the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1875. The first case of a laboratory that spent a significant part of its parent company’s revenues was that of the Edison Electric Light Company, which employed a staff of 20 in 1878. The U.S. National Bureau of Standards was established in 1901, 31 years after its German counterpart, and it was not until the years immediately preceding World War I that the major American companies started to take research seriously. It was in this period that General Electric , Du Pont, American Telephone & Telegraph, Westinghouse, Eastman Kodak, and Standard Oil set up laboratories for the first time.

Except for Germany, progress in Europe was even slower. When the National Physical Laboratory was founded in England in 1900, there was considerable public comment on the danger to Britain’s economic position of German dominance in industrial research, but there was little action. Even in France, which had an outstanding record in pure science , industrial penetration was negligible.

World War I produced a dramatic change. Attempts at rapid expansion of the arms industry in the belligerent as well as in most of the neutral countries exposed weaknesses in technology as well as in organization and brought an immediate appreciation of the need for more scientific support. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in the United Kingdom was founded in 1915, and the National Research Council in the United States in 1916. These bodies were given the task of stimulating and coordinating the scientific support to the war effort, and one of their most important long-term achievements was to convince industrialists, in their own countries and in others, that adequate and properly conducted research and development were essential to success.

At the end of the war the larger companies in all the industrialized countries embarked on ambitious plans to establish laboratories of their own; and, in spite of the inevitable confusion in the control of activities that were novel to most of the participants, there followed a decade of remarkable technical progress. The automobile, the airplane, the radio receiver, the long-distance telephone, and many other inventions developed from temperamental toys into reliable and efficient mechanisms in this period. The widespread improvement in industrial efficiency produced by this first major injection of scientific effort went far to offset the deteriorating financial and economic situation.

The economic pressures on industry created by the Great Depression reached crisis levels by the early 1930s, and the major companies started to seek savings in their research and development expenditure. It was not until World War II that the level of effort in the United States and Britain returned to that of 1930. Over much of the European continent the depression had the same effect, and in many countries the course of the war prevented recovery after 1939. In Germany Nazi ideology tended to be hostile to basic scientific research, and effort was concentrated on short-term work.

The picture at the end of World War II provided sharp contrasts. In large parts of Europe industry had been devastated, but the United States was immensely stronger than ever before. At the same time the brilliant achievements of the men who had produced radar, the atomic bomb , and the V-2 rocket had created a public awareness of the potential value of research that ensured it a major place in postwar plans. The only limit was set by the shortage of trained persons and the demands of academic and other forms of work.

Since 1945 the number of trained engineers and scientists in most industrial countries has increased each year. The U.S. effort has stressed aircraft, defense, space, electronics , and computers. Indirectly, U.S. industry in general has benefited from this work, a situation that compensates in part for the fact that in specifically nonmilitary areas the number of persons employed in the United States is lower in relation to population than in a number of other countries.

Outside the air, space, and defense fields the amount of effort in different industries follows much the same pattern in different countries, a fact made necessary by the demands of international competition. (An exception was the former Soviet Union , which devoted less R and D resources to nonmilitary programs than most other industrialized nations.) An important point is that countries like Japan, which have no significant aircraft or military space industries, have substantially more manpower available for use in the other sectors. The preeminence of Japan in consumer electronics, cameras, and motorcycles and its strong position in the world automobile market attest to the success of its efforts in product innovation and development.

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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

Pearl Millet Wins Approval From Honey Bees and Other Pollinators

Contact: Jessica Ryan Email: [email protected]

June 18, 2024

Pearl millet, an annual grass used for grain and forage, can be a good food source for honey bees and hover flies, according to a recent study.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences researchers studied the impact of pearl millet as a source of insect food by surveying insects collecting and consuming the sucrose-rich pollen of this crop. Researchers planted Tift Long-Headed Bulk, a type of pearl millet known for its long candlestick-like heads, at a research farm in Tifton, Georgia, during the past summer.

According to the survey results, the most common insects observed feeding on Tift Long-Headed Bulk pearl millet were honey bees followed by lined earwigs, and maize calligrapher hover flies. Other pollinators such as two-spotted longhorn bees, common eastern bumble bees, American bumble bees, sweat bees, and two other species of hover flies also feasted on the crop.  

“What makes the study and the results fascinating is that wind-pollinated grasses, like pearl millet, are rarely promoted as a food source of pollinators in comparison to nectar-rich plants,” said Karen Harris-Shultz , a research geneticist at the ARS  Crop Genetics and Breeding Research Unit on the UGA Tifton campus . “Our research shows that pollinators are utilizing grass pollen.”

Harris-Shultz added that the study was also the first time that lined earwigs, banded cucumber beetles, two-spotted longhorn bees, and American bumble bees were observed collecting or consuming pollen from the pearl millet crop. ARS researchers in Tifton previously studied pearl millet as a food source for pollinators in 1965, but that study has not been revisited since, according to Harris-Shultz.

Harris-Shultz and the researchers’ work focuses on bees and other pollinators of grasses, especially the turfgrass centipede grass and sorghum. The researchers took an interest in pearl millet because of its ability to thrive in areas characterized by drought, low soil fertility, and high temperatures.

These traits make pearl millet, which is grown primarily in the southeastern United States, a low-input crop with great benefits for pollinators and farmers looking for a good field border plant.  

“Contrary to popular belief that grasses have no value to bees and other pollinators, this and our previous studies showed that these grasses can be good food sources for insects and may help combat decline in pollinator populations,” said Harris-Shultz.

In addition to being pollinators, several of these insects, such as the hover flies and lined earwigs, are important biological control agents that assist in sustainable pest management.”

The study and its findings were published in the Journal of Entomological Science .

The University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES) is a conduit for leading-edge science education and research opportunities to reach students statewide. With campuses in  Athens ,  Griffin  and  Tifton , all CAES students have the opportunity to work with nationally recognized faculty in entomology, crop and soil sciences, horticulture and more.

The Agricultural Research Service is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific in-house research agency. Daily, ARS focuses on solutions to agricultural problems affecting America. Each dollar invested in U.S. agricultural research results in $20 of economic impact.

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Mary Gates Research and Leadership Scholarships: Join us for an info session this summer!

Are you an undergraduate student involved or planning to get involved in a research or leadership project? Join us for an info session to learn how the Mary Gates Research and Leadership Scholarships can support your activities! The Mary Gates Endowment for Students is offering the first info session this week (Thursday, June 20, 12-1pm on Zoom) and more sessions are scheduled throughout the summer ahead of the Autumn 2024 application cycle. RSVP here ( https://expo.uw.edu/expo/rsvp/event/1276 ) for the time that works best for you.

The   Mary Gates Research and Leadership Scholarships , supported by the Mary Gates Endowment for Students, are open to all UW undergraduate students, including all class years, all majors, and all residency statuses (US citizens, permanent residents, international students, and undocumented students are all eligible). We accept application twice during the academic year, in Autumn and Winter. Visit our  website ( https://expd.uw.edu/mge/to ) to learn more.

Mary Gates scholarships provide $5,000 ($2,500 per quarter for two quarters) for students to pursue leadership or research activities. These scholarships benefit students in the current academic year and connect students with a community of scholars and mentors.

Mary Gates Leadership Scholarship :   Students foster leadership development skills as they pursue a project or activity important to them and their community.

Mary Gates Research Scholarship :   Students engage in a research project to discover, articulate, and contribute their talents and ideas with the guidance of a faculty mentor.

Applications Open:   Monday, August 26

Application Deadline:  Monday, October 28 at 5pm

Letter of Recommendation Deadline:  Wednesday, October 30 at 5pm

Information Sessions & Application Workshops

We offer several information sessions for students to learn more about the scholarships offered through the Mary Gates Endowment. RSVP here ( https://expo.uw.edu/expo/rsvp/event/1276 )  for the time that works best for you.   We will also offer application workshops in October. Check our website for updates.

Please send any questions or inquiries to   [email protected]  and visit our advising page to schedule an appointment ( https://expd.uw.edu/mge/advising/ ).   We are here to answer any general questions about the Mary Gates Scholarships or support you with components of the application. We look forward to connecting with you!

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Strategy Supports the U.S. Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy

WASHINGTON, D.C.— The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today marked the two-year anniversary of the Biden-Harris Administration's launch of the U.S. Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy with the release of the DOE Fusion Energy Strategy 2024 and an event at the White House co-hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. 

At the inaugural event where the Bold Decadal Vision was unveiled, DOE launched a Department-wide initiative to develop a strategy for accelerating the viability of commercial fusion energy in partnership with the private sector. The newly released DOE Fusion Energy Strategy 2024 is organized around three pillars: closing the science and technology (S&T) gaps to a commercially relevant fusion pilot plant; preparing the path to sustainable, equitable commercial fusion deployment; and building and leveraging external partnerships. 

Today’s White House event aimed to further build awareness and support for fusion energy development by recognizing the tangible progress that the Biden-Harris Administration has driven to help realize the ambitious goals of the U.S. Bold Decadal Vision, as well as the significant challenges and opportunities that remain for fusion commercialization. 

“With today’s announcements, DOE has shown once again that we are ambitiously implementing our U.S. Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy,” said DOE Deputy Secretary David Turk .  "We will leverage the opportunities enabled by our world-leading public and private fusion leadership, including humanity’s first-ever demonstration of fusion ignition at our National Ignition Facility as well as major new advances in technologies such as high-temperature superconductors, advanced materials, and artificial intelligence to accelerate fusion energy. The development of fusion energy as a clean, safe, abundant energy source has become a global race, and the U.S. will stay in the lead.” 

In support of DOE’s fusion energy strategy, DOE also announced a $180 million funding opportunity for Fusion Innovative Research Engine (FIRE) Collaboratives. The FIRE Collaboratives are aimed at supporting the further creation of a fusion innovation ecosystem by forming teams that will have a collective goal of bridging the Department's Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program’s foundational and enabling science research with the needs of the growing fusion industry, including the technology roadmaps of the awardees of the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program . These Collaboratives are envisioned as dynamic hubs of innovation to help bolster US-based manufacturing and supply chains, driving advancements in fusion energy research in collaboration with both public and private entities. 

The FIRE Collaboratives Funding Opportunity Announcement, sponsored by the FES program within the Department’s Office of Science, can be found on the Funding Opportunities webpage and is open to accredited U.S. colleges and universities, national laboratories, nonprofits, and private companies. Outyear funding for the FIRE Collaboratives is subject to congressional appropriations.  FES will host a webinar on the FIRE FOA on June 7, 2024 at 12pm ET, registration is listed here . Pre-applications are due on July 9, 2024 at 5:00 PM ET.  

DOE’s Advancement of the U.S. Bold Decadal Vision 

In addition, DOE made a number of other announcements in moving toward implementation in support of the U.S. Bold Decadal Vision: 

• The Department released the agency-wide DOE Fusion Energy Strategy 2024 and a new FES vision entitled Building Bridges. These documents are closely coordinated and will guide future DOE investments in fusion energy research, development, and demonstration. As part of the Building Bridges vision, FES will develop a national fusion S&T roadmap to address the “how” and “when” of closing critical S&T gaps to commercially relevant fusion pilot plants. Find both the Strategy and the Vision at Energy.gov/fusion-energy .
• The Department announced that all eight selectees signed agreements to be participants in the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, which is designed to catalyze further private investments into fusion commercialization and helps companies resolve critical-path scientific, technological, and commercialization challenges on the path toward a pilot-scale demonstration of fusion energy.  
• DOE released a Request for Information (RFI) on a proposed Fusion Energy Public-Private Consortium Framework (PPCF). The PPCF aims to complement the Milestone Program and FIRE Collaboratives by catalyzing and bringing together state/local government, private, philanthropic funding, as well as new partnerships, to accelerate fusion commercialization. For example, a PPCF could potentially deliver and operate small-to-medium scale R&D test stands with the pace and required funding to meet the timelines of the Bold Decadal Vision. A webinar will be held July 11th at 3 pm ET. Register here .  

Why scientists fear a second Trump term, and what they are doing about it

Several federal agencies are working to safeguard research, including climate science, from future political meddling.

When the union representing nearly half of Environmental Protection Agency employees approved a new contract with the federal government this month, it included an unusual provision that had nothing to do with pay, benefits or workplace flexibility: protections from political meddling into their work.

The protections, which ensure workers can report any meddling without fear of “retribution, reprisal, or retaliation,” are “a way for us to get in front of a second Trump administration and protect our workers,” said Marie Owens Powell, an EPA gas station storage tank inspector and president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 238.

The agreement signals the extent to which career employees and Biden administration officials are racing to foil any efforts to interfere with climate science or weaken environmental agencies should former president Donald Trump win a second term. Trump and his allies, in contrast, argue that bloated federal agencies have hurt economic development nationwide and that the Biden administration has prioritized climate science at the expense of other priorities.

“One of the things that is so bad for us is the environmental agencies. They make it impossible to do anything,” the former president said in an interview with “Fox & Friends” that aired June 2, claiming that “they’ve stopped you from doing business in this country.”

The Trump administration sidelined, muted or forced out hundreds of scientists and misrepresented research on the coronavirus , reproduction and hurricane forecasting , environmental advocates said. Now as an example of what’s to come, they point to a blueprint called “Project 2025,” a plan for the next conservative administration drafted by right-wing think tanks in Washington.

The plan calls for a sweeping reorganization of the executive branch, one that would concentrate more power in Trump’s hands. At the EPA, it recommends eliminating the office of environmental justice , which was created in 2022 to address the pollution that disproportionately harms poor and minority communities.

Soon after President Biden took office, his administration began imposing scientific integrity policies across the federal government, setting rules that protect research from political interference or manipulation. Many such policies are in place — though research advocates say they aren’t durable because they aren’t enshrined in federal law, and could be undone with new executive actions.

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where a 2020 investigation found that agency leaders violated its scientific integrity policy after Trump showed a doctored hurricane forecast map , stricter standards took effect in March. A similar policy will soon be extended to the Commerce Department, including to the political appointees whose violations were detailed in the 2020 probe.

At the EPA, the new scientific integrity provision is part of a four-year contract with the agency. The provision ensures that workers’ complaints will be assessed by an independent investigator, rather than a political appointee.

While any new president could quickly transform policies around scientific integrity through new executive orders, the union contract provision is one advocates had urged as a way to make the protections harder to undo without a legal fight.

Powell said the Trump administration especially targeted climate researchers at the agency. Trump has called global warming a “hoax,” and during his first year in office, his political appointees barred three EPA scientists from speaking about climate change at a conference in Rhode Island.

Mandy Gunasekara, who served as EPA chief of staff under Trump, rejected allegations that his administration tried to suppress climate science. She said this research is likely to continue regardless of who’s in the White House.

“Climate change will continue to be an important issue in a future conservative administration, but it’s not going to be the most important issue so that it displaces the agency fulfilling its full mission,” said Gunasekara, who wrote the chapter on the EPA in “Project 2025.”

There are nonetheless heavy anxieties within the EPA over the Project 2025 proposals, said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, a former EPA official who advised agency leaders this week at a regularly scheduled meeting on the transition to the next administration. She said she reminded them that proposals to cut staff, for example, would require the cooperation of Congress.

“A lot of things on the wish list can’t happen that easily,” said Orme-Zavaleta, who serves on the board of the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former EPA employees that works to support the agency and its mission.

EPA spokesman Remmington Belford said in an email that the agency is “pleased” with the contract provision and “committed to ensuring the agency has a strong foundation of science that is free from political interference and inappropriate influence.”

While helpful, the provision won’t be a panacea, said Tim Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit advocacy group, which helped advise AFGE on the scientific integrity language.

“It will be impossible to fully Trump-proof any agency or protect any scientist if Trump wins a new term and either the House or Senate is in Republican control,” Whitehouse said. “Then there will be absolutely no meaningful oversight.”

Interior Department braces for more cuts

The Interior Department — which manages vast swaths of public land and federal waters and oversees everything from offshore oil drilling to endangered species protections — could come under intense scrutiny in a second Trump administration.

In the interview with “Fox & Friends,” Trump was asked about government programs that he would slash in a second term. “We’re going to do, like, Department of Interior,” he said in response.

It remains unclear whether Trump wants to eliminate the Interior Department or merely reduce its budget and staffing levels. Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s 2024 campaign, did not directly respond to a request for clarification.

Trump “cut red tape and gave the [oil and gas] industry more freedom to do what they do best — utilize the liquid gold under our feet to produce clean energy for America and the world — and he will do that again as soon as he gets back to the White House,” Leavitt said in an emailed statement.

Career employees exited the Interior Department in droves during Trump’s four years in office. At the end of his presidency, there were 4,900 fewer employees at the agency than at the beginning, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management.

The exodus was especially large at Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, which oversees roughly 245 million acres of public lands. After Trump briefly moved the BLM’s headquarters from Washington to Grand Junction, Colo., more than 87 percent of the affected employees either resigned or retired.

William Perry Pendley, who served as acting BLM director under Trump, defended the relocation, saying the vast majority of public lands are in the West.

“If you want to be involved with the stakeholders — the governors, the county commissioners, the local people — then you’ve got to be out West,” Pendley said, adding that Biden administration officials in Washington are “badly out of touch.”

In addition to the BLM move, in July 2017, then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke reassigned dozens of top career officials as part of a broader reorganization of the department. Joel Clement, a scientist and policy expert, was removed from his role as director of Interior’s Office of Policy Analysis and reassigned to an accounting position for which he had no experience.

In a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel — and in an opinion piece in The Washington Post — Clement accused Zinke of illegally trying to force career staffers to quit.

“That incident was a case study in them going after the people who do the science,” Clement, who now works at a philanthropic foundation, said in an interview. Ultimately, Interior’s internal watchdog found no written communications from Zinke that supported the allegation.

In April, the Office of Personnel Management finalized a rule that will allow federal employees to keep their existing job protections and right to due process, including the right to appeal a reassignment or firing. The rule overturns a Trump directive, known as Schedule F, that allowed his administration to force out thousands of career employees by changing their status to at-will workers who could be fired without due process.

New federal law is needed, some say

NOAA leaders and observers said the agency is better equipped to withstand the sort of pressure scientists faced when Hurricane Dorian was approaching the U.S. coast in 2019, and Trump used a marker to extend the hurricane forecast cone to include Alabama.

His warning prompted a quick clarification from NOAA forecasters that Alabama was not, in fact, in the likely path of the storm, and then a statement from agency leaders reaffirming Trump’s incorrect assertion. An investigation found undue political influence led to the release of that statement, violating NOAA’s scientific integrity policy.

The agency has since updated that research policy — in January 2021 and again this March, said Cynthia Decker, NOAA’s scientific integrity officer.

The policy includes guidelines on how scientists should conduct themselves, and asks them to articulate their findings openly and clearly to the public. It establishes that “credible allegations of fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and interference with or undue influence on accurate public reporting of science” can result in “personnel actions” and even referral to the inspector general’s office.

An extension of those policies to cover the Commerce Department is expected in the coming months, Decker said. It would include a mechanism by which even political appointees could be subject to allegations that they violated the integrity policy, something that could lead to a review or investigation and potential discipline, Decker said.

These updates are important because they set “that moral and intellectual compass to remind people where the curbs are in the road,” said Craig McLean, a 40-year veteran of NOAA who served as the agency’s acting chief scientist during the Trump administration.

But as strong as the policies may be, they aren’t permanent, some critics note. Legislation introduced in the two most recent sessions of Congress would have codified a requirement that federal agencies adopt scientific integrity policies and could establish legal penalties for violating them.

With such a law in place, “the next president can’t say, ‘No, I don’t care,’” when violations of scientific integrity arise, said Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA official and a senior adviser at the Center for Ocean Leadership at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

Daniel Weiner, director of the elections and government program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, said government scientists will inevitably face pressures from on high.

“There are always going to be political concerns pushing back on the science,” Weiner said. “I would expect that regardless of who wins the election.”

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Undergraduate Imagine Spring/Summer 2024 Newsletter

From the Department Head

This spring, MatSE awarded forty-six bachelor of science degrees to a unique group of students—the Class of 2024. These were our COVID-19 pandemic students, who missed traditional high school graduation ceremonies and began their college careers during one of the most uncertain times in recent history.  

Today’s undergraduate students possess unique skills resulting from their experiences with blended in-person and online education. Many have refined their time management skills, adapted to learning and working in different formats, and have experience in collaborating virtually. From virtual learning platforms to AI-driven tools, they have navigated an ever-evolving digital landscape. These students are passionate about social justice, climate change, and inclusivity. Many have entrepreneurial ambitions, and their ability and drive to innovate set them apart. Mental health awareness has also been a priority to them, and their empathy and compassion stand out.  Read more

"Explore your future" video released

MatSE at Penn State is an international leader in materials education and research. As a top-ranked program, the department thrives on a rich collaboration between faculty, staff, students, and researchers to promote a well-rounded academic experience and innovative research opportunities. Our department offers ABET accredited degree programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. View video

Undergraduate Students

Two MatSE undergraduates receive Erickson Discovery Grants

The Erickson Discovery Grant, which funds independent research projects for undergraduate students, has been awarded to 43 recipients this year. 

The Rodney A. Erickson Grant program is administered by the Office of Undergraduate Education and is designed to support undergraduate student engagement in original research, scholarship and creative work under the supervision of a research mentor. Students may use the grant to cover living expenses and project costs like supplies and travel.  Read more

Mervosh named spring 2024 Earth and Mineral Sciences marshal

Michael Mervosh has been named Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ student marshal, the top graduate overall; and Brenden Franks has been named the college’s science honor marshal, the top graduate in a non-engineering discipline. 

Mervosh earned his bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering. He will be graduating summa cum laude with a 4.0 cumulative grade-point average. Read more

Undergraduate Research Award: Excellence in Information Literacy

Penn State Libraries presented its seventh annual Undergraduate Research Award: Excellence in Information Literacy honors at the end of the spring 2024 semester.

Vyom Mehta, undergraduate students, materials science and engineering, was the fall 2023 EMS Library winner for “Platinum: Insights into the Hydrogen-based Solution for the Fossil Fuel Problem.” Read more

2024 Spring MatSE Awards Celebration 

This year marked the twenty-second annual MatSE Awards Celebration recognizing the achievements of MatSE students, staff, faculty, and alumni whose contributions continue to make MatSE a top-ranked materials science and engineering program.  Read more

2024 MatSE Spring Awards Celebration

This year marked the twenty-second annual MatSE Awards Celebration which recognized the achievements of MatSE students, staff, faculty, and alumni whose contributions continue to make MatSE a top-ranked materials science and engineering program. The event was also an occasion for MatSE to express appreciation for the generous support received throughout the year from alumni, friends, and partners. It is their generosity that is critical in furthering the MatSE mission. View video

Recording from the 2024 Annual MatSE Awards Celebration held on April 11, 2024.

2023-24 MatSE Memories

This academic year has given us many things to celebrate in the MatSE at Penn State. Here is a look back at some of the great times the MatSE family has shared during the 2023-24 academic year. View video

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This publication is available in alternative media on request. Penn State is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer, and is committed to providing employment opportunities to all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status. UBR EMS XX_XX.

Larson Publishes Research on Intergenerational Impact of Fines and Fees

Written by Staff

June 17, 2024

Ryan Larson, assistant professor in the criminology and forensic science department, is an author on a new research article entitled "Fines, Fees, and Families: Monetary Sanctions as Stigmatized Intergenerational Exchange" in  The Sociological Quarterly . Dr. Larson and his colleagues analyze 70 semi-structured interviews of debtholders in Minnesota, finding that the impacts of monetary sanctions are intergenerational and experiences as a form of stigmatized exchange. Adult children reported perceiving anger and financial strain from family members who provide payment assistance. Further, those with minor children expressed hopelessness, stress, and financial strain, as they prioritized basic needs over meeting their outstanding financial obligations. 

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Department of Economics

Cameron deal class of ’24 selected as a 2024 national science foundation research fellow.

Posted by cookb4 on Tuesday, June 18, 2024 in Uncategorized .

Congratulations to Cameron Deal of the class of 2024 for being selected as a 2024 research fellow by the National Science Foundation. Cameron graduated from Vanderbilt in the spring as an Economics Honors Student. In the fall, Cameron will be joining Harvard Business School to pursue his PhD.

Find the full list of Vanderbilt students selected as research fellows here: NSF names 34 Vanderbilt students and alumni as 2024 graduate research fellows | Vanderbilt University

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FY24 Field Initiated: Encouraging Innovation

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With this solicitation, the Bureau of Justice Assistance ( BJA) seeks to support new and innovative strategies for preventing and reducing crime, improving community safety, and strengthening criminal justice system outcomes. BJA seeks to accomplish this by promoting collaborations with the field to identify, define, and respond to emerging or chronic crime problems or justice system challenges. BJA is looking for strategies that address these issues, including trying new approaches, addressing gaps in responses, building or translating research knowledge, or building capacity . 

Solicitation Categories:

• Category 1: State, local, or tribal innovations (with a research partnership)
• Category 2: National or regional strategies to advance or translate knowledge
• Category 3: Address the recent increase in carjacking incidents (with a research partnership)

Eligible Applicants:

• City or township governments
• Public- and state-controlled institutions of higher education
• County governments
• Public housing authorities/Indian housing authorities
• Native American tribal governments (federally recognized)
• Nonprofits having a 501(c)(3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education
• Nonprofits that do not have a 501(c)(3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education
• Private institutions of higher education
• For-profit organizations other than small businesses
• Small businesses
• Other: Units of local government
• State governments

  Solicitation Webinar

On July 2, 2024, at 1 p.m. ET, BJA will hold a webinar to provide a detailed overview of this opportunity and allow participants to ask questions. Register to participate .

See the solicitation for additional opportunity and eligibility details, as well as directions on how to apply.

Similar Opportunities

• FY24 John R. Justice (JRJ) Formula Grant Program
• FY24 Smart Reentry: Housing Demonstration Program
• FY24 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Program