Why I’m Closing My Research Laboratory

This was a big day for me. Since the late 1990s, I’ve worked to become and maintain a competitive research laboratory. Today, that ended. 

A decade ago, I switched from a 9-month faculty member to an administrator, where I had the privilege of serving as the Center for Environmental Studies director at Virginia Commonwealth University.  We are a moderate-sized unit with 18 faculty, 250 undergraduate majors, and 50 graduate students.  My motivation for this transition in 2015 was to expand from creating individually competitive and impactful courses to working on designing competitive degree programs.  When I stepped in, there hadn’t been any changes or modifications in the undergraduate or graduate curricula since the unit’s inception in 2004.

The faculty and students recognized that we were not creating the most competitive opportunities for our students and decided to do something about it. Some of our successes include:

• Complete revisions of both undergraduate and graduate programs,
• Initiated two undergraduate certificate programs; one in Sustainable Innovation that was fallow and unimplemented and a new one in Outdoor Leadership, which we had hoped to grow into a bachelor’s degree program in Outdoor Experiential Education.
• Implemented unique opportunities for hands-on experiential education.
• Developed what external reviewers called "A Program of Distinction" and what curriculum assessment people say is a system set up "exactly how it should be done, though few do."
• Significant increases in student contact hours (a measure for revenue generation at the University based upon the number of students in each class x the number of credit hours).

I could not be more proud to be part of this unit. The faculty and students have all given their best to work towards a shared vision of making the most competitive programs possible.

This year, the administration at my university decided that to save funds, it is in our best interests to dissolve my unit and move the degree programs and faculty into a much larger Department of Biology, whose 2000 or so students are mostly pre-professional types. This has rendered my administrative position redundant, and I've been assured there is no room for me in any leadership position in the future.

So, on July 1, 2025, I will return to serving as a 9-month faculty member. I still have classes to teach, and committees still need warm bodies. However, this has led me to consider the shape of my next career stage and whether it should include a large genetics laboratory. Before 2015, I had multiple graduate students, technicians, and the occasional post-doctoral researcher in the lab doing landscape and population genetics work. While acting as an administrator, I could continue this, though with a much-reduced population of individuals.

My mentor told me once,

You can be big in your field or big at your institution—you cannot be both.

She was simultaneously correct and the proverbial exception to the rule by showing showing everyone that she could do both (maybe the "you" in her advice was more specific than I had thought...).

When serving as an administrator, one makes the conscious decision that facilitating success for students and faculty comes at a price, often paid in terms of professional research impacts. As much as I hate it, you can see this in my citation record, which has stopped accelerating and taken a hit.

It is the tithe we pay to work to help a broader population of individuals achieve their goals—as a veteran, I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek's Leaders Eat Last philosophy. I was happy to take the research hit to create opportunities for students and faculty.

In the last decade, the economics of this have changed at my institution. Historically, many pre-professional types translated into a tremendous need for graduate teaching assistantships. The revenue generated by 100+ sections of basic biology laboratories more than covers the cost to support, modestly, Graduate Tuition Assistantships (GTAs), which would cover tuition + fees + a stipend that (for a graduate student) could be considered a basic living wage. As such, it was easy to find great students willing to forego competitive salaries to get a graduate education with the notion of moving into a higher (after graduating) earning bracket.

This model has changed, and my institution now emphasizes having master’ s-level graduate students pursue non-thesis (e.g., only courses) programs over those that focus on developing researchers. The doctoral program we have access to guarantees funding for just the first two years (of a typical five-year) program.

The institution makes money on butts-in-seats—the more student contact hours (SCH) are generated, the more revenue comes in. The GTA's have all but been eliminated and reconfigured at a much lower remuneration for individuals to teach all those sections of introductory courses. It is not as financially viable for many students to use teaching and GTA's to get their graduate degree when you can get much better compensation working outside of academia. It is not as if the classes do not need to be still taught; it is just that the compensation is lower for those who do it. The funds those butts-in-seats generate are now allocated to other initiatives at the institution. Consequently, we are seeing an increase in part-time graduate students.

So, if I were to try to develop a large research laboratory now, the financial situation has changed. If you know how research funding works at institutions, here is an example using our institutional rates.

The Economics of Research Laboratories

I am a botanist who does not work on humans or medicine, so most of my historical funding has been from the National Science Foundation. My research is in landscape and population genetics, so I do a lot of DNA work on plants (and some insects), which requires funding to do anything in the laboratory. Genetic research is not cheap, but it is where I have focused my intellectual interests since that first Evolution course at Western Washington University back in the 1990s.

1. If you get funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in a discipline like mine, you typically submit proposals that cover three—or four years of work in the ballpark of $300- $600K in allowed costs.
2. My university’s indirect rate is 55%. Indirect costs are the additional fees an institution assesses to allow the researcher to get the funding—a tax, if you will. More prestigious institutions have higher indirect rates. If I need $500,000 to conduct research, I must submit a grant that brings in $775,000 (my 500K plus the required 55% kickback to the university). That 55% funnels back to the institution and pays for "things." In some places, everyone in the food chain takes a cut, and there is a little of it left that can come back to the researcher, which is typically spent on supporting students paying page charges to publish your work or replacing the way overpriced -80°C freezer that just died. Over the last decade, none of the indirect costs returned to the researchers.
3. However, funding agencies rarely give the total requested amount; there are limits on research funding, and they try to spread it as widely as possible. They commonly say, “Great, but we can only give you $500K total.” (or some other reduced fraction of what you requested to do the research). You have to decide if you can do the work or some subset of the work that is large enough not to make the project irrelevant for this reduced amount. However, the university still charges it 55%. So, if you accept the $500K, you will only get $323K. I take a 35% cut in my budget, but the institution keeps its indirect rate the same. The house has to get its beak wet
4. As most faculty are 9-month employees (we do not "get the summer off" as we are not paid for that time), if I were to try to give myself a salary in the summer to cover these activities, I would have to have this in the grant. We are limited to only getting two of the three months’ salary equivalents (for reasons I do not understand). When we get a salary from a grant to cover the months that the university is not paying us, it has to be the same as for the months when they do pay us... Yes, even if you get additional funds to augment your salary, you cannot exceed what the institution pays you for the rest of the year. However, it is not just the "salary" that you need to charge the grant; the institution also has a “Fringe Rate” that is negotiated and that you must pay. Our current rate is 38% for full-time faculty (9 months is considered full-time). Numerically, this works out as follows:
   1. The average salary for a full professor in Virginia is $148K (from ZipRecruiter—though my ‘average’ salary next year will be below average). This means that if I wanted to get paid to do this work, I could charge the grant up to two of the missing three months of my salary, which for the average Full Professor in Virginia would equate to 2/9 x $148000  = $32,888.
   2. This is pre-tax, and we are taxed more because the university considers summary salary on grants a “second” job. – To this, I would charge the grant the “fringe” rate of 38%, $12,497, which goes to the university.
   3. So, during the 3-year grant, I wished to be paid for my work on it each year, which would cost $45,385 a year, or $136,000 of the total grant funds.  
   4. This means that if I were interested in getting paid to do the work, I would need to spend $136,000 out of the $323,000 (roughly 42%) of the total money I received. This leaves $187,000 to do the research.
5. In the past, this commonly resulted in the researcher not taking any salary funding and using portions to cover the actual research or students covered on the grant.  So we worked for free.
   1. As a young professor, I had an interesting conversation with a university-funded consultant who asked me, “Why do you work in the summer when you are only paid for 9 months of the year?”  He didn’t understand that to get tenure—and presumably be able to keep the 9-months-a-year paychecks, and academics do whatever it takes. This often includes giving three additional months of effort to the cause (because if I don’t, I won't have a job) even if you are not compensated for it.  The consultant could not believe people did this—and this was a consultant hired to study its effort allocation reporting systems...
6. Previously, MS students cost nothing as they were on GTA to cover tuition, fees, and a stipend. However, that is no longer the case.
7. My last doctoral student cost just over $60,000 a year to support (after the two-year guaranteed funding). It is not uncommon for a doctorate to take up to five years to complete, meaning that the last three years are up to me to cover or require that the student go into tremendous debt to do the work. If I were to cover three years of support for the student, it would cost $182,085, which takes the bulk of the remaining funds in the grant.

Some of the challenges associated with a model where the bulk of student support is pushed onto the researcher instead of supported by the university include:

1. I exceeded the total grant funds before paying for any research. As a population geneticist, I find all the laboratory components, tests, reagents, sequencing, high-performance computing, etc., expensive. I exhausted the entirety of the grant before even starting to do research.
2. Funding agencies such as NSF require new grant submissions each time, which differs from medicine-related research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is not uncommon for NIH grants to be able to be renewed if the researcher shows evidence of progress and success. NSF grants must propose new research projects for every grant—no “renewal” process exists.
3. Since the grant only lasts three years, one would have to have the student already in the lab for the two years to be able to pay the last 3 years of their support.  The funding rate on NSF grants is decidedly not high, so hitting this “just right” is not quite something one would want to bet on.
4. Since the university does not guarantee 5 years of support, we are much less competitive in recruiting the best and brightest students than peer institutions that provide support. A considerable commitment must be made for a graduate student to invest half a decade in pursuing a PhD. It is not expected to spread your PhD among different institutions because the previous one couldn't fund you. So they vote with their feet and go to the institutions that can afford to commit to them.

Functionally, it is not common for even the most competitive doctoral students to enter a new program and begin publishing research immediately.  There is a “ramp-up” time as they take courses, understand the project, collect data, etc.  In my field, doctoral student are not "given a project" and sent on their way. Significant parts of their work will often be derived from the novel scientific direction they are expanding into.

As a young researcher, particularly one pre-tenure, it takes to get output from a doctoral student is not a good return on investment.  If you do not get a grant in the first 2-3 years as a new professor, the time it takes to get a doctoral student to start publishing (which is the currency of tenure) may make it irrelevant as it pertains to your ability to go through the tenure and promotion process.

• I used the model of plugging MS students into individual one-paper (2-year) projects and spending the NSF money on either postdoctoral researchers (who know how to write, are paid on the grant, and are looking to become professors, meaning they need to show research output) or technicians who are paid to produce raw data. 
• It was a successful model for me to use MS students to create foundational components of my research program and leverage my primary research efforts with postdocs or technicians.
• Before jumping into administration, I regularly maintained 3-5 MS students actively working on individual projects in the lab.

However, this model falls apart if your institution does not support research-focused MS programs or can’t sustain competitive doctoral programs. When the financial basis of training the next generation of talented researchers falls onto the professors shoulders, then only specific kinds of research are going to be those that require more cash per unit research manuscript.

So, the Return on Investment (ROI) to me, as the researcher, is that for doctoral students, we invest time and funds to bring in individuals who we see as having the potential for greatness 3-6 years down the road. If we can help them achieve those goals while supporting them with our research grants, it would be a pretty good situation if the funding were good. However, the current funding models do not suggest that 3-5 students in an active lab are reasonably doable. I do feel for the new faculty coming on board, it is getting more challenging to meet expectations.

Given the economics above, it just didn't seem to me that there was any chance of "going back to the way it was,” given the new realities at my institution. It may be different elsewhere, but we play the game we are in, not the one we wish we were. It is not reasonable for me to think otherwise. So, if I am not going to have students, do I need to maintain a full research laboratory? I have concluded that this does not make sense to me any longer. A non-trivial amount of “logistics of keeping the lab open” is typically pushed off to students and technicians—to keep institutional safety happy, etc.

So, I closed it. It has taken a few weeks to discard the irrelevant parts of my research, freeze samples necessary for the next decade, and slowly distribute the equipment and supplies I’ve accumulated since 2004.

There was some good stuff in there. It was mostly very fond memories of students, their projects, study-abroad research, posters from meetings, and older equipment that was cutting-edge at the time but now is just junk. I Marie Kondo'd all that stuff.

So Now What?

So, I’m now in a position to consider where this leads me. Now, let’s metaphorically say the “August” of my career: I’m in my mid-to-late career. I have at least another decade of vigorous work before I can start considering retirement. I'm smack dab in the middle of the sandwiched GenX demography.

• I’ve got plenty of data to write the necessary papers for the rest of my life (Don’t tell my mentor, but I still have a chapter from my PhD here). I'm sure I can maintain my sense of academic relevance to a sustainable level for the next few years.
• Honestly, my professional reputation is not sufficiently large to be 'recruited' as a researcher to a more competitive university. Full Professors are more expensive than researchers fresh out of their postdoc(s). So, if I were to go to another institution, it would probably be on the back of the administrative work I've done over the last decade.
• Given my quantitative background, my administrative activities were all data-driven, and I have found that curricula are largely unexamined. To help me, I've developed several quantitative analysis software packages for several hierarchical levels in my program.
  • Students: The FOTJ project to help build belonging, participation, and teamwork in field courses,
  • Faculty: I have written a program called BackflowStudio that helps instructors (secondary school, university, whatever) to adopt a backward design philosophy to aid in course development and assessment and,
  • Administrators: The analysis program Administravia integrates all the data sources we have as a unit and academic program administrators to give us a complete vision of how well we deliver our educational programs and how well our faculty are doing in their classes.
• The data I've collected since 2015 as we changed the programs in Environmental Studies, along with the custom software I've written, is more than sufficient to serve as an academic Case Study for a book I am tentatively calling Intentional Curriculum Design: A Data-Driven Approach for Modern STEM Curriculum. Some posts here, such as the article on linguistic covariance of STEM programs I published recently, are part of this work.
• I’ve spun up a software company, and perhaps I’ll use those extra summer months to develop consulting opportunities. I’m sure that many other institutions would value data-centric approaches to delivering more effective and impactful academic programs.

It is an exciting time. It is a scary time. Academia is an odd profession that takes 300% of your time and effort and is devious to the extent to which one can base one’s entire self-worth and identity.

I would not have guessed this is how it would all work out in a million years.

I cannot change the direction of the wind; I can only trim my sails in hopes of reaching my eventual destination.

Keep your eyes on the tell-tales.