Integrative Research: Integrative Research Initiatives
James Landers, chemistry professorResearch is vitally important to every aspect of our academic enterprise. Faculty scholarship enlivens classroom teaching. Undergraduate research reinforces and ties together classroom lessons. Graduate student research supports faculty work and helps train the next generation of scholars.
Through the campaign, we are focusing research development in areas that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, expand knowledge about significant issues of our time, and strengthen outreach in areas such as mathematics that address growing concerns nationally. Planned initiatives include:
- Advanced Theoretical Studies – One of the central roles of the University is to bring together the best minds and provide them with the tools necessary to solve the most complex problems of our day. Research in numerous fields could profit by interactions that center on conceptual theorizing about patterns, form, and function. By combining advanced computational capacity and a center for advanced research we would not only enhance the work of current University faculty and student researchers, but also attract the world’s most sophisticated thinkers — along with their new ideas, insights and tools to drive discovery.
- Center for Digital Scholarship – The University of Virginia is a world leader in creating a new kind of scholarship for a digital era, scholarship that reaches millions of people all over the world. A Center for Digital Scholarship will accelerate our research, teaching and learning on this front, enabling faculty from across the institution to understand the world in ways that other techniques can’t support. More than storing data digitally, the focus is on evaluating, analyzing and creating new forms of knowledge.
- Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences – Building on our longstanding tradition of excellence in the humanities and social sciences, the Center will strengthen the work of individual departments by creating a larger structure for intellectual exchange. The Center will promote individual and collaborative research among our own faculty, attract a steady stream of distinguished visitors, offer an inventive partnership between academic departments and the Library, and play a significant role in recruitment and retention.
- Scientific Research – Gifts from the campaign also will support fresh research on topics of great potential and importance to humanity. From discoveries in areas such as astrophysics or drug design and discovery, to issues of aging in both biological and cultural terms, to the impact of humans on the environment, Arts & Sciences will be able to lend its authoritative voice to discussions about the pressing concerns of our age.
