Partnering for Impact: A Note on Our Shared Future
Dear colleagues,
I hope that you have weathered our recent winter storms and that we can look forward to sunnier and warmer weather in the coming month.
Last week, President Rao delivered the annual State of the University address. Amidst all of the inspiring stories and accomplishments – including the fact that VCU and VCU Health have a total economic impact of $18.5 billion to the Commonwealth – I was struck by two key themes: interdisciplinarity and impact.
As a nationally-ranked, public research university, we are asking our students to consider how they will help solve some of our most challenging societal problems; these are problems like healthier communities, a stronger economy, a more resilient environment, a safer society, faster cures and smarter and more ethical technologies.
Perhaps the only thing that these challenges have in common is that they cannot simply be solved through a single focus.
Our educational structures must match the challenges we are preparing students to tackle. Our research and curricula need to be flexible and designed to cut across disciplines, departments, schools and colleges.
Take for example our recent VCU Convergence AI Accelerator workshop. Featuring panelists from Google, Microsoft, and UNOS, 85 faculty, staff and students from across both our campuses joined around a common focus and brought their experiences and expertise from a tapestry of backgrounds. The result was a lot of momentum in addressing a multitude of AI challenges, including partnerships with other convergence areas and specific interdisciplinary research opportunities.
It’s partnerships and intentional collectives like these that help us move forward, together. And create impact which is representative of this great university.
As we continue on this path of increased national and international prominence, and chart a course to becoming a $1 billion research enterprise, the ability for us to work between our silos will be the way we get there.
So, as we move through this Spring semester, I encourage you to consider how you can partner with other faculty members across campus to bring those additional perspectives to your labs and classrooms.
This is how we truly educate and prepare the next generation.
Art
Art Saavedra, M.D., Ph.D., MBA
Interim executive vice president and provost