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Strategic Plan for Research

The University of Texas at Dallas

Submitted to:

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board

Austin, Texas

Updated March, 2018

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Table of Contents:

I. Vision Statement page 5

II. Plan to Increase Research Funding and Productivity page 16 A. External Funding B. Research Priorities C. Allocation of Resources D. Student Participation

III. Plan to Improve Master’s Degree Level Education page 28

A. Current Programs B. New Programs

IV. Plan for Doctoral Programs page 30 1. Existing Doctoral Programs

A. Summary of Existing Programs B. Quality Control C. Quality Enhancement D. Comparisons with National Peers

2. New Doctoral Programs A. Areas of Emphasis B. Assessment C. Regional Impact

V. Plan for Faculty and Student Development page 36

A. Faculty Research B. Faculty Recognition C. Collaborative Partnerships D. New Faculty E. Student Awards F. Student Diversity G. Undergraduate Research

VI. Other Resources page 41

A. Research Facilities B. Library Resources C. Graduate Student Support

VII. National Visibility page 45

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Table Captions: Table 1. page 10: Ten-year history of student enrollment at UT Dallas. Numbers are given for graduate (Grad) and undergraduate (UG) students separately, both for individual students (Head Count, or HC) and the numbers of Full-Time-Equivalent students (FTE). In addition, numbers are given for full-time and part-time students in both the graduate and undergraduate categories. Table 2. page 11 Ten-year history of First-Time-In-College (FTIC) freshman enrollment at UT Dallas. Values are also presented for the 75th-25th percentile SAT and ACT scores of these students. Table 3. page 12 History since 2007 of four-year and six-year graduation rates of UT Dallas FTIC freshmen students. Table 4. page 13 Ten-year history of numbers of UT Dallas tenure-system faculty members of our seven, and then eight, schools. The subtotal numbers of faculty in two groupings of our schools are presented, along with the evolving annual ratio of these numbers and the annual rate of increase of the total number of tenure-system faculty. Table 5. page 15 Details of Strategic Plan for growth of enrollment and of numbers of tenure-system faculty and doctoral graduates, AY 2018-19 to AY 2023-24. Table 6. page 16 Ten-year history of research expenditures at UT Dallas, along with the six-year goals of this current update of our Strategic Plan. Values are presented for total research expenditures, expenditures of funds from accounts restricted for research only, and funds from federal grants and contracts. Table 7. page 18 Comparison of research productivity of UT Dallas with the published data on similar productivities at a selection of other research universities. A variety of characteristics are noted in the table, including numbers of faculty, total student enrollment, aggregate funding per student and different categories of funds expended. Table 8. page 20 Research expenditures for FY 2017 by various UT Dallas faculty units, along with the numbers of tenure-system (TTT) faculty in the three academic ranks in these units. Values are given for total direct-cost and indirect-cost expenditures along with the values of expenditures per faculty member. The average values for UT Dallas as a whole are also presented. Table 9. page 28 Current UT Dallas master’s degree programs and average numbers of graduates, aggregated by school unit.

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Table 10. page 29 Prospective master’s degree programs that UT Dallas might propose in the next five years, along with estimates of employment opportunities. Table 11. page 31 Current UT Dallas doctoral degree programs, the dates of their approvals, the average of degree production over the last three years, and the numbers of annual graduates projected by our updated Strategic Plan. In addition, the degree programs are grouped by school, and numbers of tenure-system faculty in each school are noted along with the number of doctoral graduates per faculty member. Table 12. page 34 Prospective doctoral degree programs that UT Dallas might propose in the next five years. Table 13. pages 37-39 UT Dallas faculty members, with brief professional sketches, who have been awarded CAREER or Young Investigator grants during the past three years.

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I. Vision Statement

The goal of The University of Texas at Dallas is to be one of the nation’s best public research universities and one of the great universities of the world. We intend to continue our progress toward this goal while retaining the essential nature of the University, as embodied in our founding essence, a focus on excellence of the faculty and the student body, benchmarked against the standards set by the best American public research universities.

As we plan for the future, we note that the dominant theme of our strategy today and going forward is still consistent with University strategy during the past two decades of our history. That strategy was formulated well before it was first formalized in the 2004 report of the Washington Advisory Group. It was then later officially enunciated in the first of this series of plans, submitted to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in 2008, and again reemphasized in the 2013 update of that plan. That strategy was, and remains today, in this latest version of our Strategic Plan, growth: growth in faculty numbers and growth in associated student enrollments to levels that will position UT Dallas to occupy a significant role in national research and higher education.

In the era of the late 1990’s and early in the 21st century, the goal of such growth was to increase the size of our tenure-system faculty from 200 to 400. By 2008, when the first of these reports was developed, national standards and our own closer analysis of our intrinsic issues, led us to increase the goal for our tenure-system faculty from 400 to 600. Now, we have raised that goal to 800 members of the tenure-system faculty. It is critically important to note, however, that the reasons underpinning our strategy for growth go far beyond the simple additive impact of doubling and redoubling the size of our faculty.

The impacts of linear increases in productivity and national recognition from greater faculty numbers are very significant in and of themselves. However, such increases also bring about greater than merely additive progress. This above-linear improvement in productivity results from the internal synergies that are created as we progress from an environment of individual researchers pioneering and sustaining research programs—with a minimum of associated University colleagues and students—into an environment in which the productivities of these individual efforts are enhanced by the coherent effects of collaboration and stimulation arising from critical masses of researchers pursuing related goals. Finally, the linear increase of research productivity resulting from a larger number of active faculty and the further enhancement of this productivity from the coherent amplification resulting from crossing thresholds of critical mass will, in turn, result in a non-linear increase in University stature that will further amplify the ability of UT Dallas to attract the world’s best faculty and students.

So, in this academic year 2017-18, where does UT Dallas stand, and what are our current goals for the future? We have made remarkable progress over these last fifteen years toward our goal of a nationally significant University, and we are better able to understand our situation and develop more precise goals and strategies going forward. The goals we are setting for 2023 in this current Strategic Plan are consistent with those set in our 2008 plan and in our update of that plan in 2013. They are “stretch” goals, but based on our progress over the last fifteen years, clearly within our reach. Of course, the time necessary to reach these goals depends, fundamentally, upon University financing. But, whatever the time scale necessary to achieve them, these goals will remain the pathway leading toward our future. The further evolution of the University after these goals are attained will require a new analysis of the priorities of society and the State of Texas for public

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higher education, together with a new assessment of the internal dynamics of the structure and operations of the evolved UT Dallas.

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The UT Dallas Strategic Plan for Research, updated in 2018 for 2023-2014 Goals:

The University goals we are setting for 2023-24 in this 2018 update of our Strategic Plan for Research are as follows, expressed in relation to the current state of UT Dallas operations. 20,600 FTE undergraduate students for Fall 2023, an increase of 4,100, or 25%, over our Fall 2017 numbers; 9,250 FTE graduate students for Fall 2023, an increase of 1,850, or 25%, over our Fall 2017 numbers. 300 doctoral graduates per year in AY 2023-24, an increase of approximately 100, or 50%, over the average number of graduates during the last three years; 3,800 FTIC freshman enrollees for Fall 2023, an increase of 700, or 23%, over our Fall 2017 numbers; 75th-25th percentiles of SAT and ACT scores for Fall 2023 FTIC freshman enrollees of, respectively, 1440-1250 and 32-26, relative our Fall 2017 values of 1430-1220 and 32-25; Four-year and six-year graduation rates in AY 2024 for FTIC freshmen of, respectively, 60% and 75%, relative our current values of 54% and 69%; 530,000 gross square feet of additional academic space by FY 2024, an increase of 15% over our current (and currently under construction) number of 3,540,000 gross square feet of such space;

800 tenure-system faculty members for Fall 2023, an increase of 220, or 40%, over our Fall 2017 numbers; $55 million annual expenditures for research supported with federal funds in FY 2024, an increase of $19 million, or 50% over our FY 2017 expenditures; $80 million of annual expenditures of funds restricted for research in FY 2024, an increase of $28 million, or 55% over our FY 17 expenditures; Annual unrestricted University income per FTE student that increases at a rate at least 1.5% greater than the annual rate of increase in the CPI.

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Broader University Context of this Strategic Plan for Research:

The goal of this planning exercise is to guide the rise of UT Dallas to a nationally significant position in research productivity and associated higher education. While this report highlights research productivity, it is in fact a comprehensive report on current University operations and progress along with our plans for the future. This context reflects the integral and intrinsic interrelationships between research, teaching, curricula, enrollment, excellence of students and faculty, institutional reputation, financial support, and stature within the world of public research universities. At the same time, the principal focus of the report, as is inferred by its title, is on those elements of University research that generate funding support from external agencies. This is natural, in that the magnitude of funded research is easy to measure, through the mechanisms of numbers of grants and aggregate financing, and its quality is straightforward to assess, by virtue of the nationally competitive process of awarding research grants.

However, it is essential to remember that a great deal of research is carried out with internal financing at all research universities, including UT Dallas. All tenure-system faculty at research universities are responsible not only for instructing students but also for generating new knowledge, as documented by reviewed publications or patents or by exercising and demonstrating their capacity for instructing advanced students by producing performances or works of art. In fields such as the humanities and business, there is very little external funding support for such research. Funding for research in the social sciences is markedly less than for research in the physical, biological, and engineering sciences. Faculty research in these areas where little federal funding exists is supported by the University in the contexts of faculty work assignments that implicitly fund research activity, and by the provision of research infrastructure, principally in the context of a research library and travel grants.

Research in these areas is often more difficult to measure, either in quantity or quality, than is externally funded for research, although of course such assessments are fundamental components of faculty merit assessments and career progression. Quantitatively rigorous methods of these assessments, such as those pioneered by our Jindal School of Management, are in this context very important. Hence, while this report will focus on productivity in funded research, it is essential to understand and remember that much societally valuable research is produced without external financial support, and is hence not properly assessed in reports that focus on external funding. Lack of extensive coverage of those dimensions of research in this report must not be equated with a lack of its importance to the stature and value of a research university.

The impact of a university’s research productivity results from the scholarly capabilities of the individual tenure-system faculty member, evaluated in terms of the quantity and quality of the scholarly work produced, multiplied by the aggregate number of such faculty. The number of tenure-system faculty is in turn linked directly to the University’s level of funding, as expressed in terms of the university’s income per student. In the environments in which UT Dallas and almost all other publically administered American universities operate, funding for operations is derived overwhelmingly from the universities’ instructional efforts, either directly from tuition and fee payments by students or by state support that is tied proportionately to such instruction. Hence, research productivity, being linked to the University’s number of tenure-system faculty members, is also linked with the numbers of enrolled students and the support for teaching these students that is derived from tuition and fee rates combined with state support for instruction.

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An increase in the integrated impact of a university’s research productivity must be driven by quantitative increases in numbers of research faculty members and their support facilities, combined with enhanced levels of research productivity of individual faculty members. Hence, our plan for increased research productivity and associated impact is consistent with the core values of UT Dallas, a focus on the excellence of our faculty and our students’. It is as simple and as challenging as pursuing controlled growth in numbers of students and faculty while sustaining and enhancing further student and faculty excellence. Hence, to fully delineate these fundamental factors, we preface this report with a review of the recent history of student enrollment and faculty growth at UT Dallas. UT Dallas History of Student Enrollment Table 1 presents historical data on student enrollments at UT Dallas, expressed respectively in terms of “head counts” (HC) and full-time-student equivalents (FTE.) The presentation disaggregates undergraduate and graduate student numbers and, as well, full-time and part-time students. Reviewing the data of Table 1, we note the very significant growth, in both graduate and undergraduate numbers, that UT Dallas has experienced between Fall 2008 and Fall 2017. We further note the progressive trend to larger fractions of full-time students, both graduate and undergraduate, and the relatively stable ratio of the numbers of graduate to undergraduate students over this period.

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UT Dallas Enrollment

Fall Sem.

UG HC

Full-time

UG HC

Part-time

UG HC ratio

part time/full time

UG HC

Total

UG FTE

(IPEDS Def.)

UG FTE annual

increase

2008 6,930 2,463 0.355 9,393 7,924 1.022

2009 7,326 2,475 0.338 9,801 8,325 1.051

2010 8,019 2,629 0.328 10,648 9,080 1.091

2011 9,136 2,624 0.287 11,760 10,195 1.123

2012 9,506 2,523 0.265 12,029 10,524 1.032

2013 10,635 2,414 0.227 13,049 11,609 1.103

2014 11,630 2,670 0.230 14,300 12,707 1.095

2015 12,754 2,821 0.221 15,575 13,892 1.093

2016 14,323 3,027 0.211 17,350 15,545 1.119

2017 Prelim. 15,294 3,094 0.202 18,388 16,543 1.064

UT Dallas Enrollment

Fall Sem.

Grad HC

Full-time

Grad HC

Part-time

Grad HC ratio

part time/full time

Grad HC

Total

Grad FTE

(IPEDS Def.)

GR FTE annual

increase

2008 2,669 2,880 1.079 5,549 3,711 1.076

2009 3,115 2,866 0.920 5,981 4,152 1.119

2010 3,692 2,788 0.755 6,480 4,700 1.132

2011 4,175 2,929 0.702 7,104 5,234 1.114

2012 4,804 2,894 0.602 7,698 5,851 1.118

2013 5,371 2,773 0.516 8,144 6,374 1.089

2014 5,962 2,833 0.475 8,795 6,987 1.096

2015 6,143 2,836 0.462 8,979 7,169 1.026

2016 6,533 2,910 0.445 9,443 7,586 1.058

2017 Prelim. 6,383 2,871 0.450 9,254 7,421 0.978

UT Dallas Enrollment

Fall Sem.Total HC

Total FTE

(IPEDS Def.)

Ratio

FTE GR/FTE UG

Ratio total

FTE/total HC

2008 14,942 11,635 0.468 0.779

2009 15,782 12,476 0.499 0.791

2010 17,128 13,780 0.518 0.805

2011 18,864 15,429 0.513 0.818

2012 19,727 16,375 0.556 0.830

2013 21,193 17,983 0.549 0.849

2014 23,095 19,694 0.550 0.853

2015 24,554 21,061 0.516 0.858

2016 26,793 23,130 0.488 0.863

2017 Prelim. 27,642 23,964 0.449 0.867

TABLE 1 // Ten-year history of UT Dallas enrollments

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Graduate students comprise an unusually large fraction (approximately a third) of the total UD Dallas student population relative to the profiles of almost all other research universities. The great majority of these graduate students are pursuing master’s degrees, and form a rather distinct population from the smaller number of graduate students pursuing doctoral degrees. These students seeking master’s degrees, many coming to UT Dallas from foreign universities, are an important component of current University operations. The effective size of the relatively smaller population of students pursuing doctoral studies, almost all of whom are supported with part-time University employment as teaching (TA) and research (RA) assistants, is best estimated in terms of the numbers of such appointments, which for FY 2018 are 890 and 570 respectively. Additional details about UT Dallas enrollments are provided in Table 2 and Table 3, which illustrate the numbers and scholastic characteristics of UT Dallas full-time, first time in college (FTIC) freshmen students during the past ten years. The data of Table 2 reveal the strong growth (roughly a tripling in numbers) in the size of the freshman class from Fall 2008 to Fall 2017, growth that has driven most of the overall growth in undergraduate enrollment.

Table 2 // Ten-year History of UT Dallas FTIC Freshman Enrollment and SAT/ACT Averages

Fall enrollment

by year

Number of FTIC

Freshman

Number submitting SAT scores

Number submitting ACT scores

75th percentile

of SAT scores

25th percentile

of SAT scores

75th percentile

of ACT

scores

25th percentile

of ACT

scores

2007 1,057 1,020 441 1340 1130 29 24

2008 1,118 1,065 492 1360 1140 30 24

2009 1,342 1,270 621 1350 1080 30 24

2010 1,377 1,272 685 1360 1150 30 25

2011* 1,788 1,643 885 1350 1160 30 25

2012 1,545 1,337 768 1390 1160 31 26

2013 2,233 1,921 1,083 1370 1160 31 25

2014 2,520 2,119 1,294 1360 1150 31 25

2015 2,728 2,113 1,509 1360 1160 31 25

2016 3,229 2,366 1,849 1360 1150 31 25

2017** 3,177 2,309 1,440 1430 1220 32 26

*1 Deceased Student removed from Cohort **New SAT Scoring System

The average SAT and ACT scores of these classes, also presented in Table 2, show that this growth in the size of the freshman class has taken place concurrently with increases in the already high levels of achievement in terms of student scores on national standardized tests. (The major recalibration of the SAT scoring system precludes making a clear comparison of the SAT scores of the Fall 2017 class with those of earlier classes.) The high quality of our FTIC undergraduates, and of our

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instructional and support systems for these students, is further illustrated in Table 3, which shows the four-year and six-year graduation rates of these FTIC students during this decade. Finally, the exceptional distinction of UT Dallas freshmen is perhaps most definitively highlighted by the fact that the Fall 2017 class included 157 National Merit Scholars, a number that places UT Dallas well up in the list of universities attracting these exceptional students.

Table 3 // UT Dallas FTIC Graduation Rates

Entering Cohort

Fall Number in Cohort

4-Year Graduation Rate

6-Year Graduation Rate

2007 1,057 45.8% 63.4% 2008 1,118 50.3% 70.2% 2009 1,342 47.5% 66.8% 2010 1,377 50.1% 67.1% 2011* 1,788 52.1% 69.5% 2012 1,545 54.8% 2013 2,233 53.1% 2014 2,520 2015 2,728 2016 3,229 2017 3,177 * 1 Deceased Student removed from Cohort

The aggregate enrollments projected for Fall 2017 in the 2013 update of our Strategic Plan were approximately 23,500 head count (HC) and 18,500 full-time-equivalent (FTE) students. As seen from Table 1, the actual numbers realized for Fall 2017 were 27,642 HC and 23,964 FTE. Hence, UT Dallas enrollment increases over this five-year period were, respectively, roughly 20% and 30% higher than our already optimistic projections of 2013. As can be seen in Table 1, these enrollment increases involved growth in numbers of both undergraduate and graduate students. As noted, the details of Table 1 reveal the steady trend towards greater percentages of FTE students relative to the head-count numbers, both for undergraduate and graduate students. The details in turn show that these phenomena can be interpreted as the result of relative stable populations of undergraduate transfer students, many attending part-time while holding full-time employment, and stable populations of domestic master’s degree students, also attending part-time while holding full-time employment. The recent UT Dallas enrollment growth, principally in full-time students, has been the result of growth in the freshman class and of growth in the numbers of international students seeking master’s degrees while also attending school fulltime. As we pursue our continuing strategy of increasing enrollment, we must develop strategies for increasing our enrollments of transfer students and domestic master’s seeking students.

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Increasing enrollment numbers while maintaining high academic standards has been and continues to be a central UT Dallas priority, but of course this is true for most universities. The large increase in UT Dallas enrollment over the last decade exceeds in percentage terms almost every other public university, both in Texas and nationally. This phenomenon presumably resulted from our expanded degree-program options, our expanded and improved campus facilities, and the impact on the informed public’s consciousness of the cumulative progress in stature and impact that UT Dallas has achieved over the last two decades. Aggregate enrollment is the fundamental driver of UT Dallas financing, and hence the controlling factor in faculty size. Regardless of the causation, these large increases of student enrollment have moved UT Dallas more rapidly than was projected in 2013 to a student population necessary to provide the foundation for a nationally competitive faculty size. This longer-term “equilibrium” enrollment goal has been variously stated as 30,000 to 35,000 students. Hence, in the last decade, UT Dallas has moved from about 35% to 75% of this long-term enrollment goal. Looking to the future, the foundation of this 2018 update of our Strategic Plan is still further enrollment growth. UT Dallas History of Tenure-System Faculty Numbers Table 4 presents the numbers of UT Dallas tenure-system faculty during the past ten years, disaggregating the numbers of faculty in the Schools of Engineering and Computer Science, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences from those in the Schools of Management, Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Art, Technology and Emerging Communications. This disaggregation is made because of the qualitatively different availability of external research funds for research in the areas of science and engineering as compared to that available for research in other disciplines.

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The aggregate numbers of UT Dallas tenure-system faculty for the years 2008, 2013 and 2017 are 399, 510, and 580. Our goal for 2017, projected in our Strategic Plan as updated in 2013, was 600. Hence, we have achieved about 96% of that goal in terms of the total number of tenure-system faculty. However, combining the growth in faculty numbers with the greater-than-projected growth in enrollment yields the obvious consequence that the increases in the numbers of our tenure-system faculty have been inadequate to maintain the desired student/faculty ratio. Specifically, the ratio of FTE students to tenure-system faculty has increased from 29 to 35 to 41 over the decade. UT Dallas adjusted, as necessary, to this trend in the numbers of tenure-system faculty by increasing the relative numbers of the faculty who serve outside of the tenure system. By this mechanism, we have maintained an adequate ratio of FTE students to FTE faculty, tenure-system and otherwise, which grew only from 20 to 22 over this same period. While the effectiveness and quality of instruction provided by our non-tenure-system faculty is excellent, and comparable to the performance of their colleagues in tenure-system, their teaching obligations are approximately double those of the tenure-system faculty. This precludes their active participation in funded research. Hence, while total instructional effort has grown in proportion to enrollment growth, research productivity has not. Our inability to match our growth in tenure-system faculty numbers with our growth in enrollment has resulted, in part, from an erosion in per capita student funding in absolute terms, and an even greater erosion in this funding when corrected for inflation. This erosion has been the consequence of legislative funding of instructional productivity that has not kept pace with inflation, together with external constraints imposed on tuition and fee increases. Simply stated, increases in the University’s annual financing have been insufficient to hire additional tenure-system faculty at the rate needed to maintain student/tenure-system faculty ratios at the levels projected in the Strategic Plan of 2008 or even at the level projected in the 2013 update of that plan. However, in addition to this attrition of per capita student funding, changes in the internal allocations of University resources have seen other University expenditures in non-instructional domains increase more rapidly than instructional expenditures. Some of these changes were volitional, as presaged in our Strategic Plan of 2008, in particular the significant expansion of our divisions of development and communications. Other changes were the consequences of unfunded mandates from governmental agencies dictating expansions of oversight and investigatory operations and financial management and control systems. Table 5 presents the details of our plans for the years FY 19 through FY 23, showing how we plan to advance toward the goals for enrollment and faculty numbers specified at the beginning of this update of our Strategic Plan for Research. As stated, underlying the projections for increase in faculty numbers is the assumption that aggregate per capita student funding, resulting from the combination of legislative support and student tuition and fee payments, will increase faster than inflation by at least 1.5% per year.

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Our Strategic Plan calls for annual enrollment growth rates of 3% to 4% in each of the four cohorts that together make up the UT Dallas student community. A review of Table 1 might suggest that, as was the case in our 2008 and 2013 plans, this will be an underestimate of actual growth, since our enrollment grew at a rate of 7.5% over the last decade. However, there is reason for caution about such optimism. The number of FTIC freshmen did not grow between Fall 2016 and Fall 2017, and the number of entering full-time master’s seeking students actually declined over this same one-year period. And, Table 1 also shows that the growth rates in part-time undergraduates (transfer students for the most part) and part-time graduate students (employed Dallas residents) were not as strong as in the first two cohorts. Hence, we have to be concerned about global trends in higher education and increasing competition for international graduate students who pay non-resident tuition rates. Likewise, we must be concerned about exhausting the rich load of talent graduating from the high schools of the DFW area. We also need to achieve better results from the recruitment of our once-dominant cohorts of local transfer students and part-time master’s students. While the goals for enrollment are certainly reasonable from the standpoint of recent history, achieving them will demand focused attention and consistent effort. And, fundamental to achieving these enrollment goals is maintaining and even elevating the current high scholastic aptitudes of our entering students.

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II. Plans to Increase Research Funding and Productivity II.a. External Research Funding Table 6 presents the ten-year history of research expenditures at UT Dallas, along with the targets for the next six years of growth, as set out in this 2018 update of our Strategic Plan. As is conventional in our Texas environment, values for three different categories of funding are shown: the total amounts of University funds expended for research, the amounts expended from funding sources that are restricted solely for the purpose of research, and the amounts expended from federal grants and contracts. The amounts quoted for total expenditures have roughly doubled over the decade, while the more rigorously defined values of restricted and federal expenditures have increased by roughly 50 percent. But, while current values are significantly higher than those from ten years ago, the data also show a flattening of progress during the last several years.

The values for research expenditures from those University accounts “restricted” to research expenditures were $49.9 and $52.0 million for FY 2016 and FY 2017, respectively. These values exceed the $45 million threshold mandated by the Emerging National Research Universities legislation. Given that UT Dallas has also satisfied the other necessary levels of University performance specified for qualification, we anticipate that we will begin to receive distributions in FY 2018 from the National Research Universities Fund endowment established by this legislation.

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The expected annual funding from the NRUF, of about $6 million, will fund a major enhancement of our research productivity during the next five years covered in this Strategic Plan, an increase of revenue that does not depend on increased enrollment. In the limiting case, in which we invest these funds exclusively in the hires of new faculty who have the promise of carrying out significant amounts of funded research, significant improvements in the ratio of tenure-system faculty to FTE students will result along with significant increases in annual research expenditures from federal funds. The values projected for FY 2017 in the 2013 update of our Strategic Plan for total, restricted and federal research expenditures were $137, $85, and $46 million, respectively. However, as can be seen from Table 6, the actual values for FY 2017 were $113.2 million, $52.0 million, and $36.1 million. Thus, we did not reach any of the goals projected for the three expenditure categories projected for FY 2017 in the 2013 version of our Strategic Plan. The discrepancies between the projected research expenditures for 2017 and our actual achievements cannot be attributed to a failure to hire the number of faculty members projected in that same 2013 plan, since that goal was almost achieved. Rather, inspection of Table 6 suggests that the over-estimation in the 2013 projections for future increases in research expenditures resulted from an over-reliance on the trends observed for the years 2008, 2009, and 2010. In retrospect, the growth observed over those years can be attributed to the effects of the sharp, but unfortunately temporary, increases in federal research funding that occurred as part of the government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. Extrapolating from 2008, 2009 and 2010 into the future yielded a growth rate that turned out to be overly optimistic. It is therefore pertinent to consider carefully what realistic per capita levels of external funding will be when projecting research productivity into the future The productivity of UT Dallas in generating expenditures for research is compared with the records of a selected group of national public research universities and to those of the group of Texas Emerging Research Universities in Table 7. The lag in published data is such that these comparisons date from 2015-16. The relevant data include the sizes of the faculties and of the student bodies, the aggregate funding of the universities on a per student basis and the aggregate amounts of research expenditures from federal funds and from all funds.

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ed.

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The one hundred to two hundred American universities that characterize themselves as “Research Intensive Universities” are highly heterogeneous in sizes, histories, missions, per capita student funding, and political environments. Meaningful “peers” for rigorous comparisons are difficult to identify for most universities, and certainly they are elusive for UT Dallas. While officially we are approaching our 50th anniversary of our founding, the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science only admitted students (and only into electrical engineering of the engineering disciplines) in 1988, and UT Dallas was only allowed to enroll freshmen and sophomores in 1990. Arguably, we are closer to thirty years of development rather than fifty. Hence, the comparisons provided in Table 7 are useful mostly for calibrating the national research landscape, not for judging the relative effectiveness of different cohorts of university faculties or of different structures and personnel of university administrations. The funding level for general university operations, normalized for enrollment size, has the most direct impact on the numbers and qualities of the research-productive faculty members that are the foundation of a university’s research productivity. However, the gross research funding levels that are collected in Table 7 depend on many other factors than just the excellence or even size of its tenure-system faculty. One very large factor is whether or not the quoted values for research funding include the operations of an affiliated medical school and hospital. Another is whether a university has an official “Land Grant” status or, officially or de facto, has “Flagship” status. Less obvious than these factors, but also very important in the magnitude of a university’s record of research expenditures is the university’s “effective” age, in particular whether or not it was in full operation in the years immediately following World War II. The post-war surge of funding for university research, inspired by the role of science and engineering in the successful war effort, gave rise to creation of large research establishments, operating independently of regular tenure-system faculty, that significantly augment the aggregate research expenditures of their host universities. It is very difficult from the macroscopic data available in national reports to isolate the individual contributions of regular tenure-system faculty with their concurrent teaching and research missions from the contributions of large cohorts of professional research staff. One or more of these factors are important in the research productivity of most of the non-Texas universities whose records are listed in Table 7. The cleanest examples to use for calibrating the status of UT Dallas relative to national standards in the dimension of external research funding are the University of California branches at Riverside, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. All of these universities, like UT Dallas, were effectively created after the post-war expansion of university research and do not have medical schools or Land Grant or Flagship status. The average of the expenditures of federal research funds for these three institutions, about $90 million, is more than double that of UT Dallas. This differential is most easily explained by the integrated effects of forty or so years of higher per capita student funding at the California schools and their consequent hosting of some nationally funded research centers. Comparison of UT Dallas research expenditures with the records of some of the other Texas Emerging Research Universities indicates that all of the Texas schools in this category also fall well below the national standards set by the California universities mentioned, and very far below the normalized expenditures of the large national leaders. The most obvious explanation is again a combination of institutional age and status and consequent funding levels.

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II.b. Priorities in expanding research productivity To achieve the goals of our Strategic Plan for increasing research expenditures during the next five-year period, UT Dallas must attempt to focus the resources available for hiring additional faculty on further strengthening those research areas currently demonstrating the most dynamic funding activity. This focus must be tempered, of course, by accommodations for the evolving profile of student enrollment. However, it will be difficult to reach our ambitious goals without setting some overall priorities in faculty hiring. The details of UT Dallas productivity in funded research are shown in Table 8, which presents the FY 2017 expenditures from externally funded research grants obtained by faculty in the seven UT Dallas schools with doctoral programs. As mentioned earlier, the UT Dallas schools in which externally funded research is a significant dimension of faculty activity are Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and Engineering and Computer Science. There are smaller amounts of funded research activities in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, and very little in the schools of Management, Arts and Humanities, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Art, Technology, and Emerging Communication. These data to a first approximation reflect the patterns of research funding at the national and state levels for research in the various fields of scholarly endeavors, and do not reflect the efforts and abilities of the faculties in these latter schools to advance the states of knowledge in their fields.

There are several complementary strategic approaches to expanding funded research. The most straightforward approach is simply to strengthen the ranks of tenure-system faculty in those schools

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whose faculties have already demonstrated the best capacities for developing increased funding for their research. Alternatively, a more fine-grained strategy would be to identify the specific areas within those schools and prioritize faculty hiring in those specialties that promise to yield the greatest increases in external funding. Yet another approach would be to focus on preferred sources of external funding and to prioritize faculty hiring to increase yields from these specific sources. Examples would be federal funding, broken down further into NIH, NSF, DOD, etc. funding, versus industry grants, versus private gifts. A final strategy would be to prioritize faculty hiring to support some larger, institution-wide strategy of University development. A review of Table 8 shows that the departments of biology, chemistry and physics dominate the generation of research funding in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, both from the aggregate and per capita perspectives. The departments of bioengineering, computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering all show strong aggregate funding at the departmental level, with some variation at the per capita level. In the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which is not departmentalized, detailed inspection shows that the majority of external funding is generated by faculty in the area of neuroscience, with some significant contributions also from faculty in the areas of psychology and cognitive science. Hence, a straightforward Strategic Plan for increasing external research funding would be to prioritize additions of tenure-system faculty these to these units. An alternate, more analytical strategy, rationalized by the ever-increasing interdisciplinary nature of fore-front research projects, would be to reformulate priorities in terms of the most promising fields of specialized research. On the basis of our evolved faculty strengths and their research orientations, the most significant current research areas at UT Dallas are those related to human health, cyber security, electrical circuits and devices, and advanced materials. In all of these areas, faculty growth in recent years has seen the development of significant clusters of faculty addressing the same or closely related topics. Some of these clusters incorporate faculty and students from multiple academic units and specialties. Many are formally recognized as designated research centers, while others currently are less formally organized. In these clusters, the synergies of several talents focusing on a set of related research topics create some very significant enhancements of aggregate research productivity with significant cost effectiveness. Focusing on further strengthening these emerging research clusters, some of which are noted in the following, could be highly effective in increasing research funding Human Health: The Texas Biomedical Device Center focuses on combinations of materials, circuitry and treatment theories for a variety of medical conditions and diseases, ranging from cancer to tinnitus. Its activities are enhanced with income from an endowment designated for its support, which provides both stability and freedom for innovation for its work. Faculty members from bioengineering and neuroscience cooperate in the Center’s research projects. The Center for Vital Longevity and Center for BrainHealth, with facilities nearby to the UT Southwestern campus, focus on research in the areas of memory and aging, with major reliance on the fMRI brain-scanning facilities of the Advanced Imaging Research Center, a UT Dallas-UT Southwestern collaboration based at the medical center. Several other UT Dallas engineering and neuroscience faculty members also collaborate with the faculty of these centers and use some of the same UT Southwestern facilities.

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Other major UT Dallas health-related research activities are being pursued in the areas of mobility, of biocompatible materials, of psychological and physical health and disease, and of non-opioid pain relief. Much of the funded research in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and some in the Department of Computer Science, also focuses on health issues. Finally, much of the research in the departments of biology and chemistry is focused on fundamental studies of the precursors and treatments of disease. The Callier Center for Communication Disorders, also with facilities adjacent to UT Southwestern, has been a major element of UT Dallas research, education and service for many decades. Focusing on hearing, speech and developmental disorders, Callier scientists have a long history of complementary collaborations with UT Southwestern physicians and with colleagues in the Department of Electrical Engineering in advancing the effectiveness of cochlear implants. The research as well as service activities of the Callier Center can draw on a very substantial endowment dedicated to their support. Advanced Materials: Many faculty members in the departments of physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, and, materials science and engineering, have research interests in the area of advanced properties of materials. The Department of Material Science and Engineering is, in a sense, a highly focused research center that makes primary use of the clean room facility in NSERL, as will be discussed in a later section of this report. The Alan MacDiarmid Nanotech Institute, led by Professor Ray Baughman of the Department of Chemistry, has pioneered in the development of nano-structured carbon fibers, and the Von Ehr Distinguished Chair endowment supports the nano-science research of Professor Moheimani in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Space Science: The William B. Hanson Center for Space Sciences has its antecedents in the earliest days of the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, the precursor of UT Dallas. The highly productive leaders of the center are members of the Department of Physics whose research focuses for the most part on the “electromagnetic weather” in the near-earth atmosphere of outer space, as mediated by the solar wind. This research has major implications for power grids and satellite communications. The space-based research of the center is complemented by remote sensing studies of terrestrial environmental factors. TxACE: The Texas Analog Center of Excellence is a collaboration between the Semiconductor Research Corporation, Texas Instruments, and UT Dallas, and plays a major role in the research of the Department of Electrical Engineering. The center’s research involves a network of investigators at UT Dallas and other universities, and focuses on the analog devices vital to the analog/digital mixed signal industry. This research has very important commercial implications for a broad variety of transistor-based devices. Cyber Security:

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One of the most dynamic research groups at UT Dallas is focused on the extremely topical issue of cybersecurity. Professor Bhavani Thuraisingham leads a highly productive and well-recognized faculty cohort that has become a national force in this critical area. Their research covers a broad spectrum of issues in cybersecurity, including data and applications security, active malware defense, secure cloud computing, cryptography, security analytics, network security, and hardware security. This dynamic cluster of faculty is enjoying great success in securing federal funding for their work. Wind Energy: In the area of mechanical engineering/environmental science, UT Dallas has made a major investment in a state-of-the-art large wind tunnel. When operational, it will be used for both education and research, with the hope that the large and growing commercial wind energy enterprises in Texas will provide funding to support operation of the facility. Funding Sources: Yet another perspective of strategic planning for research growth is provided by sources of external funding. As on the national scene, UT Dallas received much of its external funding from the NIH. Funding from the NSF is widely distributed but not deeply in any area. DARPA funding is important for many of our newer initiatives. Perhaps atypical for a research university of our age and size, considerable research funding comes from industry grants and gifts. Unique to Texas is research funding from the Welch Foundation and from CPRIT. Institutional Strategies: Finally, strategic planning could be based on longer term and more fundamental institutional objectives. Our plan is to focus on strengthening collaborative and synergistic research projects involving faculty from UT Dallas and UT Southwestern. This emphasis, with the consequent priority given to strengthening biomedical engineering and neuroscience research, dictates the importance of acquiring additional UT Dallas research space adjacent to the UT Southwestern campus. Concurrently, a committee of faculty members from both institutions will continue developing procedures to facilitate such collaborations. II.c. Allocation of Resources Research productivity is based fundamentally on high-achieving, research-focused, tenure-system faculty. Supporting these faculty efforts are the physical facilities of space and state-of-the art equipment, talented staff, and sufficient numbers of excellent student collaborators. Hence, the primary challenge UT Dallas faces in continuing to increase the institution’s research expenditures during the next five years will be in generating and allocating sufficient funds to expand the ranks of research-intensive faculty and providing them with the support to be productive. The financial resources necessary to fund our targeted goals for increased research productivity fall into two categories, annual operating costs, principally consisting of faculty and staff salaries, and capital investments in space and equipment. The resources for the operations component of our updated Strategic Plan are calibrated to be funded from growth in enrollment and the associated improvements in the funding level per individual student. Funding for capital investments in space and equipment must be provided from other sources, principally appropriations from the Texas

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Legislature and allocations of bonding authority by The University of Texas System Board of Regents. As noted and demonstrated, external research funding opportunities are the greatest for faculty in the research areas covered in our School of Natural Science and Mathematics, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. Hence, to the degree possible we will focus on expanding the faculties of these schools. The doctorate-seeking graduate students recruited by the schools to fill Graduate Teaching and Research Assistantships are of course the traditional student component of University research. The quality and quantity of an institution’s doctoral graduates are key indices of university stature. UT Dallas has invested additional resources and created new programs to enhance research productivity in the domain of doctoral education. As will be noted subsequently in this report, we have made little progress toward meeting our decade-long goal of 300 PhD graduates per year. Meeting that goal will require that additional resources be allocated to doctoral student support. II.d. Student Participation in Research Undergraduates: UT Dallas benefits from a large cadre of highly talented and ambitious undergraduate students who major in the various domains of science and engineering. We also are fortunate to possess a powerful and effective array of endowed programs that support the meaningful and productive engagements of these students with faculty researchers. The Anson Clark endowment supports placement of incoming freshman honors students in faculty research groups during the summer before their first fall semester. These experiences orient these outstanding students to the benefits of individual-study research projects with faculty, and most of them continue a heavy program of individual research during their entire undergraduate experience. The pre-freshman year summer research support also is a significant component of our recruitment strategy for these outstanding students. The McDermott Scholars endowment also provides the same sort of pre-freshman year research summer for its awardees. The Cecil and Ida Green Scholars endowment focuses on individual placements of twenty or more junior-level undergraduates for semester-long full-time appointments in research laboratories at UT Southwestern. To date, most of the Green Scholars have come from the chemistry program, but we anticipate opening the opportunities up to students in other majors, in particular bioenginering. Finally, the recently endowed Margaret McDermott Fund for Undergraduate Research will provide major additional support for undergraduates to perform individual research both at UT Dallas and at other labs, nationwide and overseas. Individual faculty initiatives have already established a strong network by which our undergraduates are welcomed into prominent research laboratories world-wide, and the new McDermott endowment will provide our students with the necessary financial support to take full advantage of these opportunities. In addition to the endowed programs noted above, administered through the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College, the various academic degree programs, schools and departments, and the Office of Undergraduate Education, also support and operate programs to encourage the engagement of

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undergraduates in active research programs. These include The Exley magazine, devoted to publishing the results of outstanding undergraduate research publications, and an annual University-wide poster session of undergraduate research projects undertaken with faculty mentors. To graduate with recognition from the enhancement program Collegium V, administered by the Honors College, students must present an honors thesis based on independent research. Similarly, most departments require a similar program of independent research to graduate with “School” honors. Finally, in recognition of the exceptional intellectual capacity of our top undergraduate students, most UT Dallas research programs now proactively recruit and employ undergraduates as significant components of their entire research efforts, with many undergraduates having significant roles in and sharing credit for, the resulting research publications. The Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science has created a new and very dynamic combination of undergraduate research and professionally relevant education for UT Dallas with its senior capstone design course. The concept of Senior Design entails cohorts of several students each working on a project suggested by an industry partner, mentored by both faculty and representatives of the sponsoring business. UT Dallas teams have won first place awards for three successive years at the ASME Student Manufacturing Design Competition. Since its creation, the Senior Design has been adopted by most of the departments of the Jonsson School, with many of the student cohorts having membership in more than one field of engineering. The capstone projects not only provide excellent preparation for after-graduation careers, they often also provide the seeds for entrepreneurial activities. Graduate Students: Doctoral education is, of course, synonymous with independent research carried out by graduate students under the guidance of faculty who are actively engaged in research themselves. The first level of University engagement in supporting this domain of student research is to provide the faculty members who are capable of directing meaningful research and, also, the facilities with which faculty and students can perform that research. Also at this most basic level, the University must provide the financial support that enables doctoral students to pursue their degrees without the diversions of seeking financial support outside the University. This student support comes in the form of either Graduate Teaching Assistantships (TAs) or Graduate Research Assistantships (RAs.) These are positions in which students enroll for nine or twelve credit hours of study each semester and concurrently are engaged part-time in professionally relevant duties. These duties are assisting in the University’s instructional efforts (TAs) or assisting with faculty research projects (RAs.) Essentially all of the UT Dallas degree programs employ TAs, whose salaries are a component of departmental budgets, while only those units with significant external research funding have the resources, allocated by the principal investigators of the grants, to provide salaries for RAs. University-wide support to enhance the career preparation for doctoral students commences with intensive orientation sessions organized by the Office of Graduate Studies that address the responsibilities of teaching and research participation. Initial orientation sessions are supplemented by several other programs provided by the Office of Graduate Studies that are designed to enrich the quality and effectiveness of doctoral study during its entire duration and enhance post-graduation careers.

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Responsible Conduct of Research Series: In collaboration with the Office of Research, the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) series is designed to offer graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty members training in conducting research in an ethical and scientifically responsible manner. The RCR series is offered in a blended format. To earn a certification in RCR Foundations, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty first complete an Online Responsible Conduct of Research course developed by Epigeum (owned by Oxford University Press). To earn further certification in RCR Development, participants attend five additional in-person workshops addressing the topics: Introduction to Responsible Conduct of Research, Designing Your Research, Conducting Your Research, Reporting Your Research, and Responsibilities to Society. To earn RCR Professional Series Certification requires completion of the RCR Foundations Training and the RCR Development Series plus two elective seminars presented by prominent faculty experts in their areas of expertise. Elective seminar topics include: Research Ethics – Avoiding the Pitfalls of Research Misconduct, Mentor and Mentee Responsibilities and Relationships, Human Subjects in Research, and Data Management and Ownership. Graduate Writing Services: The objective of Graduate Writing Services is to assist graduate students with their academic writing goals by providing individual consultations, workshops, graduate student writing groups, and offering quiet space for student writing. Individual consultations provide support for graduate students by offering them one-on-one help at any stage of the writing process. Writing workshops address a range of topics: Writing with Style, Preparing Manuscripts for Publication in the Physical Sciences, Writing the Literature Review, Managing Materials, Defending the Dissertation Proposal, Creating Titles and Abstracts, and Publishing Your First Journal Articles (separate workshops for the humanities and the social sciences). Graduate Writing Services also facilitates discipline-specific writing groups to offer members an accountability system, a forum to discuss their writing goals, and feedback from their peers and the Graduate Writing Services facilitator. Twice a week, Graduate Writing Services offers a quiet space for graduate students to write. Graduate Fellowships and Grant Writing Workshops: The Office of Graduate Studies offers one workshop series to help students with writing fellowship applications; topics include Knowing Your Sponsor, Writing Competitive Personal Statements, Projects Proposals/Research Statements, and Planning and Asking for Letters of Recommendation. The Office of Graduate Studies offers another workshop series on research grant proposals; topics include Knowing Your Sponsor, Writing Fundable Proposal Descriptions, Evaluating Your Program, Spend Smart: Writing Grant Budgets and Budget Justifications, Broader Impacts/Community Engagement, and Writing Facilities and Equipment Sections. Dissertation Research Awards: Dissertation Research Awards fund doctoral students’ dissertation research in amounts up to $5,000, with priority given to those who have applied for external research funding. Applications are invited in the spring and awards are made in mid-May. Best Dissertation Awards: For the first time in April of 2017, the Graduate Council oversaw the process of selecting a Best Dissertation Award for each of the seven schools that award doctoral degrees. Each school developed their own process for selecting award winners; each winner was selected by program faculty and presented with a $1,000 honorarium and an engraved plaque at the inaugural Excellence in Graduate Education reception.

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Center for Teaching and Learning Faculty Discussion Group on Graduate Research Mentoring: In the fall of 2017 in collaboration with the Center for Teaching and Learning, the graduate dean lead a faculty discussion group on the topic of graduate research mentoring, focusing on research compacts and developing guidelines for optimal mentoring for both supervising faculty and graduate students. Provost’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Research Mentoring: In collaboration with the Office of the Provost, a new award was created to recognize Excellence in Graduate Research Mentoring. The criteria for selection include sustained dedication to excellent mentoring of graduate students, the quality of the mentoring as assessed by peer faculty and students, and career outcomes for graduated doctoral students.

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III. Plan to Improve Master’s Degree Level Education

III.a. Evaluation of programs and relation to the strategic plan for research At present UT Dallas offers 59 master’s programs. The number of programs offered by each school and annual graduation numbers, based on a three-year average, are listed in Table 9.

UT Dallas is strategically focused on graduating master’s degree graduates for current and developing local and global workforce demands. In keeping with employment demands, the largest numbers of master’s degree students graduate from programs in the Naveen Jindal School of Management and the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. The two most productive programs in terms of degrees awarded are information technology and management (average of 503 graduates annually) and computer science (average of 448 graduates annually). Since the last update of our Strategic Plan, we have added three new master’s programs: business analytics; energy management, and actuarial science. In addition, we will be offering a MA in art hIstory starting in the fall of 2018. Many of our master’s degree programs also prepare students for careers in research and development. At present, 23 programs offer students the opportunity of gaining direct research experience by completing a research project and thesis as part of their degree. In addition, eight degree programs have a capstone or other analogous project as a degree requirements. A large number of our students pursuing a master’s degree with a goal of a job in business and commerce, work alongside doctoral students and in in research laboratories as assistants. As UT Dallas hires

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more faculty with externally funded research programs, the research opportunities for master’s students will increase. Master’s students also have the opportunity to gain real-life experience in the community. UT Dallas continues to partner with local industries, government and non-profit organizations to provide networking and internship opportunities. Growing and maintaining partnerships with global companies in North Texas and abroad will provide additional internships and additional job opportunities. III.b. New Master’s Programs Table 10 shows some of the new master’s degree programs we will consider developing during the next five years. In general, we are, and will continue to be, cautious in creating new programs at any level, because our priority is to devote the maximum possible available financial resources to strengthening our currently existing programs that are central to our goals for increasing research funding. New programs inevitably have an initial negative impact on current financial resources. In general, we will consider new master’s programs only in instances of very high immediate demand and only in areas in which existing faculty strengths are such as to not need augmentation to serve the new program.

Based on the projected ten-year trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the programs noted in Table 10 are expected to have increasing demands for graduates. Jobs in cybersecurity are predicted to increase by almost 30% over the next ten years and increases of more than 10% are expected in the fields of chemistry, environment and energy science, and urban and regional planning. In some of these areas, existing faculty strength may be such as to make new degree programs cost effective.

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IV. Plan to Improve UT Dallas Doctoral Degree Programs IV.1.a. Summary of Current UT Dallas Doctoral Programs

Table 11 lists the thirty currently existing UT Dallas doctoral degree programs, their implementation dates, and their current average annual graduation numbers. Table 11 also shows the aggregate production of doctorates per faculty member in the seven schools and, finally, the 2023-24 goals for PhD graduates from the various programs. The annual number of doctoral graduates has hovered just below 200 for several years, seemingly uncorrelated with the background of large increases in overall student enrollment. Both the UT Dallas 2008 Strategic Plan for Research and its 2013 Update set the goal for UT Dallas as 300 doctoral degrees granted annually. We again are setting that goal, for AY 1013-14, in this latest update of our Strategic Plan. This goal was ambitious given past and current faculty numbers, but did not appear at either time to be out of reach. This goal is still ambitious, but now we understand that we will have to take substantive actions for it to be realized in the next five years.

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ProgramName Date

Annualaverage

numberofgraduates,

AY15throughAY17

NumberofTenure

SystemFaculty,

AY2018

DoctoralDegrees

perYearper

FacultyMember

Projectednumberof

graduatesinAY2024

SchoolofNaturalSciencesandMathmatics-subtotal 36.0 111 0.32 58

Geosciences 1969 3.0 5

Physics 1969 7.7 11

MathematicalSciences-AppliedMathematics 1974 3.0 6

MathematicalSciences-Statistics 1974 4.3 8

Biology-MolecularandCellBiology 1991 7.0 12

Chemistry 1999 11.0 16

SchoolofManagement-subtotal 13.6 110 0.12 23

InternationalManagementStudies 1974 2.3 7

ManagementScience 1974 11.3 16

SchoolofArtsandHumanities-subtotal 17.6 45 0.39 24

Humanities 1974 2.0 3

Humanities-AestheticStudies 1982 7.3 9

Humanities-HistoryofIdeas 1982 2.3 5

Humanities-StudiesinLiterature 1982 6.0 7

SchoolofArts,Technology,andEmergingComm.-subtotal 3.7 24 0.15 5

ArtsandTechnology 2010 3.7 5

SchoolofEngineeringandComputerScience-subtotal 76.3 154 0.50 110

ComputerScience 1983 15.0 23

ElectricalEngineering 1991 33.0 36

ElectricalEngineering-Microelectronics 1991 1.3 0

TelecommunicationsEngineering 1991 2.7 4

ComputerEngineering 2002 1.7 5

SoftwareEngineering 2002 3.3 7

MaterialsScienceandEngineering 2006 8.3 11

BiomedicalEngineering 2009 8.0 12

MechanicalEngineering 2012 3.0 12

Economic,Political,andPolicySciences-subtotal 28.7 58 0.49 45

PublicPolicyandPoliticalEconomy 1975 7.3 10

Economics 2003 2.3 5

PoliticalScience 2003 3.7 8

PublicAffairs 2004 6.7 9

GeospatialInformationSciences 2005 3.0 5

Criminology 2006 5.7 8

BehavioralandBrainSciences-subtotal 22.0 56 0.39 35

CommunicationSciencesandDisorders 1983 1.7 5

Audiology(Au.D.) 2001 9.0 12

CognitionandNeuroscience 2004 9.3 13

PsychologicalSciences 2004 2.0 5

TOTAL 197.9 558 0.35 300

Table11//UTDallasdoctoraldegreeprograms,withcurrentandplannedgraduatesperyear

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Of course, there is the five-year lag time between “input and output” in doctoral education, but better productivity was certainly expected during the last few years. The most plausible explanation for our inability to achieve this goal is, first, and most simply, a failure to increase numbers of newly enrolling doctoral students at a rate sufficient to yield the desired increases in numbers of doctoral graduates. There may be secondary factors such attrition rate for doctoral students that are too high and faculty cultures in some areas that are inconsistent with effective doctoral education. However, it seems clear that insufficient “input” is the primary reason, or at least is the factor that is most easily amenable to strategic planning. The evidence for this conclusion is that the number of funded doctoral students has not increased proportionately to the other dimensions of University growth. In contemporary higher education, almost all doctoral students, at essentially all universities, receive financial support in the form not only of remission of the tuition and fee costs but in terms of income from either fellowships or stipends for nominal half-time employment as teaching assistants or research assistants. As was noted in the discussion of the enrollment trends shown in Table 1, UT Dallas currently employs fewer than 900 teaching assistants and fewer than 600 research assistants. In the model world of five-year matriculation times for doctoral students and in the perfect world of no attrition, this number of supported doctoral students would yield no more than 300 doctoral graduates a year. However, graduation rates for doctoral candidates are far from 100%, and too many of the graduate students holding assistantship positions are not intending to continue to graduation. Hence, a meaningful strategic plan to reach the goal of 300 doctoral degrees a year must entail devoting significantly more financial resources to support more teaching assistants, and at higher levels of stipends in many cases. It will take time to ramp up a better doctoral student recruiting effort and even more time for these investments to bear fruit. An increase of 10% per year in the aggregate allocations for TA support during the next five years would seem to be the minimum needed to achieve the goal of 300 annual graduates per year. Fortunately, the financial investment in more teaching assistants has many substantial financial and educational benefits to the University much more important than an arbitrary goal of 300 doctorates per year. Hence, these investments will have positive impacts on overall university operations.

V.1.b. Controlling the Quality of Current Doctoral Degree Programs UT Dallas has two doctoral programs that average fewer than two graduates per year for FY 2015, 2016 and 2017: Communication Sciences and Disorders and Computer Engineering. The Communication Sciences and Disorders program is a highly specialized program that is small at our peer institutions (including UT Austin) and the program remains dedicated to active recruitment. The Computer Engineering Department is also engaged in vigorous recruiting efforts. As noted by the Coordinating Board staff in letters regarding UT Dallas’ third-year or annual progress reports, the newer programs are exceeding initial enrollment projections and have quality faculty productivity. In addition, a recent policy change to the graduate catalog that reduced the minimum number of hours to graduate with a doctoral degree (from 90 to 75) will assist graduate output for all doctoral programs. UT Dallas will consider issues of cost, need and current enrollment to develop action plans to increase productivity for programs the University wishes to retain. V.1.c. Enhancing the Quality of Current Doctoral Degree Programs Faculty will expend great energy in recruiting more and better doctoral students and will receive training in how to advertise their doctoral programs and promote their research laboratories.

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Additional domestic recruitment will be vitally important for attracting students eligible for support on federal training grants. International recruitment efforts will focus on attracting the most talented students from around the world. To allow faculty to attract and retain excellent doctoral students, UT Dallas will provide doctoral students with competitive stipends and health insurance benefits. The Eugene McDermott Graduate Fellows program will be expanded and restructured to make it more accessible to more doctoral programs, and other prestigious graduate fellowships will be established to attract the most outstanding doctoral students to UT Dallas.

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IV.2. Prospective New UT Dallas Doctoral Degree Programs IV.2.a. Areas of Emphasis For the 2013 update of this report, UT Dallas identified several future doctoral degrees to request for implementation over the next ten years, but none of them have been implemented to date. Our focus has been on enhancing the quality of the doctoral programs we currently have. Table 12 includes doctoral programs we will consider developing over the next ten years. When determining which degree programs to develop, UT Dallas considers local, regional, state, and national student and job market demand. As illustrated by Table 12, UT Dallas plans to increase its doctoral programs predominantly in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science in order to enhance our growing collaborations with UT Southwestern Medical School.

When considering new doctoral programs, UT Dallas heavily emphasizes programs that are natural extensions of existing programs. Chemical engineering, for example, is relatively easy to add given current strengths in chemistry and rapidly expanding capabilities in materials science and engineering as well as a developing expertise in biomedical engineering. All of the programs in Table 12 have similarly natural connections to existing faculty members and programs.

IV.2.b. Plans for Assessment of New Doctoral Degree Programs Internal and external reviewers assess all UT Dallas academic programs approximately every seven years. UT Dallas’ Academic Program Review policy governs a periodic review of academic programs and charges the review team to provide an “assessment of the goals, plans, staffing, resources, existing and potential strengths … and those areas needing improvement” to determine the program’s viability. The process includes a review team that typically is composed of at least three individuals from other institutions that have programs similar to those of the unit under review, at least two members from the UT Dallas faculty, and a member of the program review committee who is not affiliated with the program being reviewed. The review team evaluates the unit as requested by a written charge that instructs them to “[e]valuate the quality, the effectiveness, and the efficiency of the undergraduate and graduate curricula and the delivery of instruction,” as well as to evaluate the appropriateness of its assessment plans and student learning outcomes. In accordance with the guidelines and instructions issued by the provost, the unit undergoing review prepares a comprehensive self-study document and sends it to the review team prior to its on-

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campus visit. Before leaving the campus, the team holds exit interviews with the unit’s faculty and administration, the provost, the president, and other appropriate senior administrators. The review team summarizes its immediate impressions and provides a forecast of its eventual written report. After the chair provides the provost with the final report, the unit under review provides its written response to the review team’s recommendations and conclusions. The provost then prepares final recommendations to the president to complete the review. In the years between reviews of the unit, the results of the program review are used when making decisions on budget, staffing, curricular and degree changes, and allocation of special resources. In addition to the rigorous external periodic review of all doctoral programs, UT Dallas assesses student learning outcomes annually and submits this material to the Office of the Provost. This assessment report includes program mission statements, program-specific student learning objectives, measures to achieve those objectives, findings that evaluate the criteria of success, and future action plans to improve upon the findings. Faculty, program heads and deans use the assessment report to identify areas that need improvement and make necessary adjustments.

Finally, UT Dallas uses the Coordinating Board’s 18 Characteristics of Texas Public Doctoral Programs as a guide to assess the quality of its doctoral programs. Regional Impact. UT Dallas’ Strategic Plan includes initiatives that reflect a substantial responsibility to interface with the DFW Metroplex. To attain this goal, UT Dallas is committed to establishing collaborative programs with UT Southwestern and UT Arlington. IV.2.c. Regional Impact of Prospective New Doctoral Degree Programs Dallas-Fort Worth is one of the world’s leaders in technology delivery businesses, including aerospace, defense systems, information technology, micro and nano electronics, telecommunications, and many others. There is a tremendous appetite for leading academic research to produce discoveries and to provide the human talent needed. This appetite extends across nearly all areas of physical sciences and engineering. Additionally, the DFW area is a fast-growing center for biotechnology, bioinformatics, medical devices and the life sciences and has 38 basic chemical manufacturing facilities, 32 pharmaceutical and medical facilities, 215 medical equipment and supply facilities, and 170 scientific R&D firms. With the selection of its future doctoral degree programs and research, UT Dallas is well poised to meet the Metroplex’s needs and to help the entire region to advance. The impact of this will be monitored internally by the Office of Research and the schools and externally through industrial advisory boards and other local partnerships.

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V. UT Dallas Strategic Plan for Faculty and Student Development

V.a. Improve faculty productivity Faculty research productivity in the aggregate can be improved both by improving the productivity of existing faculty and by raising the average faculty productivity by adding new faculty whose productivity is greater than the existing average. Since individuals who are already UT Dallas employees will continue to constitute the large majority of our tenure-system faculty members, it is vitally important to sustain and enhance their productively in funded research. Several new policies and actions are being taken with this goal in mind. UT Dallas is adopting a new faculty work-load policy that will for the first time give explicit recognition of externally funded research productivity. This new policy will provide both reinforcement for productive faculty and incentives for others to become productive. Another new policy will enable faculty members with significant externally funded research to augment their annual salary by up to 10% from budgets linked to the indirect cost expenditures on their grants. In addition to these new policies, the vice president for research and the dean of graduate studies are collaborating to offer additional mentoring and assistance to faculty regarding availability of research funding and the practical details of how to do it. Current policies provide substantial rewards to the academic schools that are proportional to the indirect cost expenditures recorded by their faculties. Our enhanced educational programs about external funding will fully explain the multiple advantages that be derived from increased attention and effort to increase the university’s aggregate externally funded research.

V.b. Improve recognition of faculty The most impressive national recognition of our faculty currently consists of the growing number of Young Investigator Awards won by our assistant professors. These awards are presented in detail in Table 13. The fundamental basis of this recognition is the individual talent of the faculty member, nurtured by graduate and post-doctoral training, and strongly supported by UT Dallas in the beginning stages of a new faculty career. The support at UT Dallas includes constructive mentoring by more experienced faculty colleagues, an effective support structure in the offices of the academic department and of research administration, the necessary equipment and research facilities, and a work-load structured to support vigorous research activity. The goal for the next level of faculty recognition is to increase the number of our more senior faculty who are members of one of the national academies. With one exception, all of our current academy members earned that honor before joining UT Dallas. We will continue to recruit members of the National Academies whose research careers are active and congruent with our current and emerging research priorities. We will also attempt to facilitate the election of some of our current faculty members by providing them with the optimum platforms to demonstrate their leadership before the relevant national audiences.

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Table 13 // Young Investigator and CAREER Awards for UT Dallas Faculty members, 2015-2016-2017

Dr. Robert D. Gregg – 2017: National Science Foundation — (CAREER) Recovering and Enhancing Natural Locomotion in Changing Conditions with Powered Lower-Limb Prostheses and Orthoses. Dr. Gregg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is also the Director of Locomotor Control Systems Lab. He is the Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics, a conference editorial board member for IEEE Control Systems Society, and a current review panelist for the National Science Foundation (NSF). His research focuses on the control mechanisms of human locomotion with applications to wearable and autonomous robots.

Dr. Taylor Hutchins Ware – 2017: US Air Force Office of Scientific Research — (YIP) Designing Microstructure in Ordered Polymer Actuators. Dr. Ware is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering. He is also a member of several professional societies, co-inventor of five patents, and author or co-author of more than 40 scientific publications. His research interests include liquid crystal materials, flexible and stretchable electronics, biomaterials, and the interfacing of these technologies.

Dr. Chadwin Delin Young – 2017: National Science Foundation – (CAREER) Fundamental Electronic Device Performance and Reliability Investigation on Chalcogenide- and Oxide-based N- and P-type Materials for Large Area/Flexible Electronics. Dr. Young is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He has participated in several Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) conferences and workshops and has served as a guest editor for IEEE Trans. Device and Materials Reliability – IIRW. His research interests focus on electrical characterization methodologies, reliability characterization methodologies, solid state device physics, electrical properties of materials, MOS modeling (quantum effects, etc.), nanotechnology, flexible electronics, and future energy needs (renewable, low power operation, etc.).

Dr. Vibhav Giridhar Gogate – 2017: National Science Foundation – (CAREER) Fast, Accurate Estimation and Prediction using Markov Logics. Dr. Gogate is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He has participated in the UAI 2016 Probabilistic Interference Evaluation. His research interests include machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), data mining, and big data.

Jeremiah Joseph Gassensmith – 2017: National Science Foundation – (CAREER) Viral Capsids as Smart Nanocontainers. Dr. Gassensmith is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry. His research focuses on three areas of research, wherein biologically inspired viral capsids are used to improve the performance and process-ability of new materials that otherwise would not be as easily accessible without the noncovalent forces provided by these unique scaffolds.

Dr. Tyler Holt Summers – 2017: US Army Research Office – (YIP) Quantifying network controllability and observability using optimal control and estimation metrics. Dr. Summers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests focus in feedback control and optimization in complex dynamical networks, emphasizing theoretical tools and computational methods and driven by applications to electric power networks and distributed robotics.

Dr. Lunjin Chen – 2016: US Air Force Office of Scientific Research – (YIP) Investigation of Wave Particle Interaction in the Earth's Magnetosphere using Conjugated Observations. Dr. Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics. His research focuses on the nature of electromagnetic waves in our geospace and the effect of wave-particle interaction.

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Dr. Ryan Patrick McMahan – 2016: National Science Foundation – (CAREER) Leveraging the Virtualness of Virtual Reality for More-Effective Training. Dr. McMahan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Review Editor for Frontiers in Virtual Environments, and has sat as co-chair for several IEEE Virtual Reality Conferences and Symposium. His research interests focus on virtual reality (VR), training transfer, 3D user interfaces (3DUIs), and human-computer interaction (HCI)

Dr. Alvaro Cardenas – 2016: National Science Foundation – (CAREER) Practical Control Engineering Principles to Improve the Security and Privacy of Cyber-Physical Systems. Dr. Cardenas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering. He is a member of the Cyber Security and Education Institute. His research focuses on cyber-physical systems and IoT security and privacy, network intrusion detection, and wireless networks. An Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering, he is a member of the Cyber Security and Education Institute. His research focuses on cyber-physical systems and IoT security and privacy, network intrusion detection, and wireless networks.

Dr. Fabiano Da Silveira Rodrigues – 2016: National Science Foundation – (CAREER) Experimental and Theoretical Investigation of the Electrodynamics and Structuring of the Low-Latitude Ionosphere. Dr. Rodrigues is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and in the William B. Hanson Center for Space Sciences, a research center in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. He has conducted research at some of the largest and most sensitive radio observatories in the world, including the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Jicamarca Radio Observatory in Peru. His research focuses on physics of the upper atmosphere, ionospheric electrodynamics and irregularities, development and application of remote sensing techniques for fundamental and applied studies of the upper atmosphere, numerical modeling studies of the thermosphere and ionosphere, and studies of ionospheric irregularity effects on signals used by global navigation satellite systems (GNSS)

Dr. Michael D. Burton – 2016: National Institutes of Health – (K22) The Role of Cell-specific TLR-4 Signaling in Developing Chronic Pain. Dr. Burton is an Assistant Professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He is currently a member of the Texas Pain Research Consortium. His research focuses on how the immune system modulates peripheral sensory neurons to regulate pain and energy homeostasis.

Dr. Kenneth Leon Hoyt – 2016: National Institutes of Health – (K25) Molecular Ultrasound Imaging of Cancer Response to Antiangiogenic Therapy. Dr. Hoyt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering. He is a member of the Technical Standards Committee of the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM) and Technical Committee member of the Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers Alliance of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). His research interests focus on cancer research, medical imaging, signal and image processing, and ultrasound.

Dr. Carlos Alberto Busso – 2015: National Science Foundation – (CAREER) Advanced Knowledge Extraction of Affective Behaviors during Natural Human Interaction. Dr. Busso is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. He has held many chair positions, including Program Chair for ICMI and Publicity Chair of Interspeech last year. His research interests are in digital signal processing, speech and video processing, and multimodal interfaces and his current research includes modeling and understanding human communication and interaction, with applications to automated recognition and synthesis to enhance human-machine interfaces.

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Dr. Fatemeh Hassanipour – 2015: National Science Foundation – (CAREER) Biofluid Dynamics of the Human Breast: Characterization and Fluid-Structure Interaction. Dr. Hassanipour is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She has participated in several conferences, including “An Experimental Study on Human Milk Viscosity”, in November 2016. Her research focuses on heat transfer and fluid mechanics with applications in energy conservation, storage, and management, electronic cooling, health and bioengineering (modeling and simulation of biomechanical systems).

Dr. Arif S. Malik – 2015: National Science Foundation – (CAREER) Highly-Efficient Dynamic Prediction Models for Quality Improvement in Cold Rolling. Dr. Malik is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering. He has organized several conferences, including “Engineering Brighter Futures for Autism” last year. His research focuses on computation mechanics, uncertainty analysis, reliability-based design optimization, rolling of metal alloys, micro air vehicle wing design, and laser peening.

Dr. Yonas Tegegn Tadesse – 2015: Office of Naval Research – (YIP) Musculoskeletal System Design, Fabrication and Modeling for Robotic Systems. Dr. Tadesse is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests focus on humanoid robotics, emerging applications of smart materials, sensors, and actuators, mechatronic system, multimodal energy harvesting, modeling, controls and biomimetics.

Dr. Majid Minary-Jolandan – 2015: Office of Naval Research – (YIP) Towards Advanced Nanoscale Additive Manufacturing (AM) of Metals: A Fundamental Theoretical, Multi-Physics Simulation and in situ Electron Microscopy Approach. Dr. Minary-Jolandan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His research focuses on multifunctional materials, bioinspired materials, nanomanufacturing, advanced manufacturing, nanobiomechanics, and nanomaterials.

Dr. Andrian Marcus – 2015: National Science Foundation – (CAREER) Management of Unstructured Information During Software Evolution. Dr. Marcus is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science in

the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering. He currently serves on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions

on Software Engineering, the Empirical Software Engineering Journal (Springer), and the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process (John Wiley and Sons). His research focuses on software engineering, with

focus on software evolution and program comprehension.

Dr. Bilal Akin – 2015: National Science Foundation – (CAREER) Real-Time Fault Diagnosis and Failure Prognosis of Next Generation Power Electronics Systems. Dr. Akin is an Associate Professor in the

Department of Electrical Engineering. He is a Senior Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Member. His research focuses on fault diagnosis and condition monitoring of power electronics components

and drive systems; design, control, and diagnosis of electric motors and drives; power electronics, digital

power control and management; and applications of control theory, machine learning, and signal processing to

energy conversion systems.

V.c. Collaborations, internal and external As noted at several stages of this report, progressively more extensive and intensive collaborations in research between UT Southwestern and UT Dallas faculties offer a unique avenue by which UT Dallas can build the productivity and stature of its research program. The symbiotic complementarity of the needs and capabilities of the agendas of the two institutions offer each the prospect of significantly enhanced research productivity. Internal collaborations are also noted throughout the discussions of research in this document. Collaborations such as between bioengineering and neuroscience are deep and seamless, and at a broader level, the boundaries

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between the various classical disciplinary cohorts such as mechanical engineering and biology and materials science have become difficult to distinguish. In another perspective, growing role of “big data” in many disciplines has made computer science a critical adjunctto many research projects. V.d. Plans for Recruitment of New Faculty At the current stage of the University’s development, evidence indicates that the most cost-effective strategy for new faculty recruitment is a focus on entry-level assistant professors with strong research portfolios from their doctoral and post-doctoral studies with research groups notable for high external funding. This strategy can be complemented by recruitment of individuals three to eight years into their faculty careers at other universities who have demonstrated a strong upward trajectory in research funding. A reduced focus is needed at present on recruiting senior scholars, although top individuals who have the potential to significantly boost the productivity of a key research area must always receive close attention.

V.e. Student Awards

UT Dallas has established an enviable record of national recognition for our undergraduate students, thanks to the innate excellence of the students themselves, the rigorous UT Dallas curricula, the cultivation on independent research activities as noted earlier in this report, and comprehensive mentoring by staff in the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College and the McDermott Scholars Program. During the last three years, the record of UT Dallas undergraduates who competed for prestigious national and international awards are as follows: Truman Scholarship: One award, two finalists Marshall Scholarship: One award Rhodes Scholarship: One finalist Gates Cambridge Scholarship: One award Schwarzman Scholarship: One award Goldwater Scholarship: Seven awards, four honorable mentions. NSF Graduate Fellowships: Seven awards On a much broader front, recipients of UT Dallas bachelor’s degrees have established outstanding records of admissions into and fellowships from the leading professional schools and graduate programs in the United States. Again, this record is the result of the graduates’ innate abilities, the rigorous UT Dallas curricula, and the supportive environment created by the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College, the McDermott Scholars Program, and dozens of dedicated faculty mentors.

V.f. Diversity of Doctoral Students UT Dallas has been ranked by US News and World Report as one of the 20 most ethnically diverse student bodies in the U.S. It remains a priority to increase the representation of the state’s underserved populations in our graduate programs. To this end, the University, led by the Office of Graduate Studies, will make it a priority to gain participation in the McNair Program.

V.g. Undergraduate Research Engagement

The engagement of UT Dallas undergraduates in research has been addressed in Section II.d.

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VI. Other Resources VI.a. Research Facilities UT Dallas has been fortunate to have received support for construction and equipping of several major facilities for experimental research during the last dozen years. Major new facilities, starting with completion in 2007 of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Laboratory (NSERL) have been constructed and are currently being constructed and equipped in concert with our additions of new research faculty. “NSERL” The original multi-purpose research facility at UT Dallas, the 192,000 square foot Natural Sciences and Engineering Laboratory was opened in 2007, after being funded to support the expansion of the engineering program under the project referred to as “Emmitt.” Intended to support particular research in the areas of material sciences and semiconductor technology, the facility currently accommodates faculty conducting research in electrical engineering, materials science engineering, physics, chemistry and biology. NSERL also is the site of the University’s major cleanroom laboratory and its small-animal Vivarium, facilities that are utilized by all University faculty whose research requires these services, as well as other shared measurement and characterization laboratories. The Cleanroom Research Laboratory (CRL) is a 5,000-square-foot space with filtered, vertical laminar flow air, classified as a 10k facility. It is equipped to support advanced research in the fields of microelectronics, electronic materials, nanotechnology, MEMS, lithography, and optics. Its capabilities enable research in characterization and metrology, deposition (OPCVD and PECVD), plasma etching (metals, dielectrics, and deep silicon etch), contact print and e-beam lithography with nanometer resolution, thermal processing, thin-film deposition (e-beam evaporation and magnetron sputtering) and wet-processing surface chemistry. The CRL professional staff has extensive experience with semiconductor processing technology in both academic and industrial environments. They collaborate with researchers in support of their projects and provide training and oversight for the students using the facility. The NSERL Vivarium - the Lab Animal Resource Center (LARC) - supports the use of vertebrate animals in research programs across a variety of disciplines including neuroscience, chemistry, biology and bio-engineering. In addition to animal care and husbandry services, the LARC provides training to researchers, students and staff in rodent handling, rodent anesthesia, surgery, euthanasia, and specialty techniques as requested by investigators. The physical assets of the LARC include a 9,000-square-foot animal housing and support facility with secure access to laboratory spaces in both NSERL and the Bioengineering and Sciences Building (BSB). Veterinary and husbandry care is provided on a 24-hour basis, including weekends and holidays, with on-call staff responding to any reported emergencies. UT Dallas holds an approved NIH assurance and USDA license for the LARC. Its programs and operations are regularly evaluated by UTD’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). “BSB” The 220,000-square-foot Bioengineering and Sciences Building was opened in the fall of 2016. It is built immediately south of the NSERL building and is connected with NSERL at the basement and third-floor levels and the two buildings actually operate an approximately 400,000-square-foot

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facility for advanced research. The priority for assigning space in BSB and NSERL is based on faculty whose research activities require access to the CRL and/or the LARC facilities. BSB is the principal home for research in bioengineering, biology, neuroscience, and significant elements of chemistry. It also houses the departmental office of those three academic departments. As the numbers of research faculty and students occupying BSB has increased, we have been able to proceed to a more cost-effective way of providing researchers with state–of–the-art equipment by establishing shared “core” laboratory facilities managed by professional staff, in the spirit of the LARC and CRL. “The Edith O’Donnell Building” This building, opened in 2013, is the home of the school of Art, Technology, and Emerging Communication (ATEC) and comprises 157,000 square feet of offices, classrooms and research laboratories. Research laboratories support studies in motion capture, robotics, game design, animation, sound/acoustic design and automata. Typically, the laboratories have reconfigurable infrastructure that allow faculty to respond to changing interests and opportunities. “The Engineering Complex” Other than in the NSERL and BSB facilities, the research space and faculty offices currently occupied by the faculty of the Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science are located in several different buildings, including the original ECSN building and the later, connected, ECSS building, the Modular Lab Buildings 1 and 2, and components of the ROC, ROW and WSTC buildings. The computer science faculty and research laboratories are concentrated in ECSS, while electrical engineering faculty and research space are concentrated in ECSN. Both of these buildings also provide many teaching classrooms. “Berkner” Berkner is the second oldest remaining research facility on campus. It is occupied principally by faculty in the Department of Chemistry who house their offices and laboratories there along with some teaching laboratories. “Founders” The Founders building is the first and oldest structure on campus. Recently renovated, the structure now houses biology and chemistry research laboratories along with most of the faculty of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. UT Southwestern collaborations

There are several research groups housed in facilities near the campus of UT Southwestern including the Center for Vital Longevity, the Center for Brain Health and the Callier Center. Collectively, these facilities provide offices and research space for faculty in the School of Behavior and Brain Sciences. “Engineering West”

The new 206,000-square-foot Engineering West building that is currently under construction will be the principal home of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Physics” Groundbreaking for the new, 185,000-square-foot Physics Building occurred in spring 2018.

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“New Space” In order to continue UT Dallas’ progress in externally funded research and, more fundamentally, our continued health as a student-serving institution, funding for at least two new major buildings must be secured during the next five years and construction of at least one of them commenced. On the main UT Dallas campus, the most fundamental need is for a comprehensive academic building that will provide classrooms to replace those in several prefabricated buildings that have outlived their viability. These latter buildings were constructed as emergency measures to meet early enrollment growth in the absence of funding to construct proper facilities. The present necessity of holding classes in these decaying facilities creates chronic problems of faculty and student dissatisfaction. This new building must also provide facilities for rehearsals and performances of student music, theater, and dance productions. The outstanding science and engineering students attending UT Dallas also are intent on continuing their lifelong engagements with the arts, particularly with music performance. Our present inability to provide our students with adequate facilities is a significant issue in recruitment and retention of these excellent students. Concurrently, the lack of space of campus performances inhibits our ability to develop fully a campus environment and culture that supports student retention. A totally different need is for major new research space on or adjacent to the UT Southwestern campus. The prevailing informed opinion of faculty leaders at both UT Southwestern and UT Dallas is that such a facility, ideally shared, is essential for the current very promising research collaborations on biomedical science and engineering to realize their full potential. The value of such a building should be recognized by the leaderships of both the UT System and the Texas Legislature. Equipment for Experimental Research: Assistance from the UT System will be needed to provide the optimal experimental equipment for the new research laboratories being constructed in the Engineering West and Science buildings. Support for this equipment will need to be funded through the UT Regents’ STARS program and through other targeted allocations of PUF support. This support for capital projects has been absolutely crucial to the progress we have made over the last ten years and will remain essential over the next five years as well. The core equipment clusters in BSB are new and need only some further expansion in the coming years. However, much of the critically important equipment in the NSERL cleanroom is reaching the ends of its effective life, and will soon have to be replaced. Another critically important array of equipment for our large and powerful group of neuroscientists studying the human brain, is the fMRI and PET facilities at UT Southwestern. UT Dallas contributed to the funding of these facilities, and the two universities enjoy a close and fruitful partnership in this area. Resources for Computational Research Computationally intensive research now is pervasive in many different fields. As at other research universities, needs for computational power is stratified into three levels. Many individual researchers and students, taking advantage of the continuing power of Moore’s Law, have assembled

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their own computational centers relying on the powerful and inexpensive servers now available. These facilities are now housed at a commercial facility adjacent to campus that provides high levels of security and reliability. Groups with more advanced computational needs work with the UT Dallas Office of Information Technology on a common facility that both provides more computing power and serves as a test bed for those researchers with computing needs that require the most powerful available facilities. For this third stratum of computational research, UT Dallas faculty and students make use of the state of the art facility provided by UT System. VI.b. Library Resources The Eugene McDermott Library, staffed with more than seventy professionals, has been in the vanguard of investing in electronic information assets, with the concurrent convenience of remote access to the reference material needed to support competitive research. Library acquisitions are funded by a dedicated student fee that ensures the growth of assets in proportion to the growth in student enrollment. Currently, the library has assets of 650,000 printed books and 1,400,000 electronic books. Additional research assets are 700,000 microforms, 530 data bases, 135,000 journals in print form and 97,000 journals in electronic form. Our Interlibrary Loan Service, enhanced by the Rapid partnership, facilitates access to material not in the McDermott Library’s collection, with articles typically received within eleven hours of request. The Library is open 24/5 on week days and 16 hours on weekends. Eight professionals are dedicated to instructing and assisting with faculty and students on how to make the most effective use of the Library’s resources. They offer organized instruction in addition to personalized assistance. They also offer supplemental instruction within regular courses in the curriculum that deal with such topics as research on grant opportunities and evaluating the most valuable research literature in given fields of research. VI.c. Graduate Student Support Cohorts of well-qualified students in adequate numbers is essential to the quality of doctoral education. Our Strategic Plan calls for increasing both the academic potential of incoming doctoral students and increasing their numbers. The foundations for this progress are more vigorous recruitment efforts at all levels - departmental, school and university - together with compensation levels that are competitive with national peers. This effort will involve increased efforts by department and school faculty and staff in advertising for and recruiting doctoral students. It will also require a comprehensive effort at all levels of the university’s central administration, as well as of the leaders of the academic units, to prioritize increased investment in the numbers of Teaching Assistants and the levels of their financial support. The Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies has been significantly strengthened over the last two years, with aim of providing our graduate students with more support and shared community, as was described in more detail in Section IV of this document. The Graduate Dean will also take the lead role in the periodic review of the effectiveness of graduate programs and work with faculty and administrative leadership in the schools and departments to improve recruitment and retention and graduation of doctoral students. The recent endowment of the McDermott Fellows Program provides the stimulus and financial model for creating improved programs of doctoral education.

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VII. Strategic Plan to Increase the National Visibility of UT Dallas A young and relatively small university such as UT Dallas faces a natural and obvious challenge in acquiring the national reputation for its research achievements that matches its current actual level of achievement. Reputation lags years and decades behind reality, whether that reality is ascending or descending. An effective Strategic Plan to increase research productivity must address this challenge actively. A good national reputation is vital to recruiting the best students and the best faculty. It is also self-reinforcing, in that the better the background impression in the various dimensions of national perception of a university’s reputation, the more effective are the incremental notices of achievement in enhancing that reputation still further. A university’s stature, not only in the perception of the general public but also within the academic communities themselves, is both reflected in and influenced by the rankings of universities that has become a specialized media business niche world-wide. UT Dallas has enjoyed some positive attention in some of the more influential of these various ranking surveys. In terms of the institution’s stature overall, it was gratifying that the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education elevated UT Dallas into its highest category of research universities. This ranking, historically referred to as “R1”, is shared by 115 U.S. universities. Perhaps the most unique UT Dallas ranking, even if regrettably transient, is that from the Times Higher Education survey, listing UT Dallas as the best U.S. university under 50 years of age, and 21st

best among universities world-wide. UT Dallas is regularly ranked by Kiplinger’s as one of its “Best Value” universities, most recently ranking 32nd nationally and second best in Texas among public universities, and is similarly ranked 37th by Money Magazine. UT Dallas positions in the plethora of ranking systems put out by US News and lesser known media has steadily improved over the last twenty years. In many of these lists, UT Dallas ranks third among Texas public universities trailing only UT Austin and Texas A&M. An analysis of most national ranking systems such as US News and World Report shows that the dominant factor that reduces the rankings of Texas universities is the “reputation” ranking. The topic of this section is thus highly relevant. How can UT Dallas and other Texas universities better penetrate the national consciousness regarding the objective quality of our public universities? One obvious approach to pro-actively attempting to expedite closing the gap between a growing level of actual achievement and lagging recognition of those achievements is an active campaign of publicity directed at the multiple levels of public perception of a university’s stature that are relevant. This sort of campaign addresses the placement of news stories about individual and institutional achievements in the mass media, advertising in both the mass media and in those media which target the attention of the academic audiences whose perceptions are most important to how the University is perceived. In this latter dimension, targeted mailings to peer groups of university leaders and faculty also play a large role. As a foundation of enhancing the reputation of the University, whether in the minds of the more general public or in the perceptions of peer academics, is an effective web site. All of the usual approaches to building the University’s reputation by “pushing” information out into the public domain are limited in their effectiveness, and also in their cost-effectiveness, by the plethora of competing “advertising” from other universities, whose agendas are similar to ours, and even more by the relative insignificance of any university campaign when compared to the ubiquity of commercial advertising. The most important “publics” in determining the stature of a university

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are the various levels of academic peers, from university leaders – presidents, provosts, deans and department heads – to individual national research leaders and, finally, the rank and file of faculty in the various academic fields. The most impactful way to raise the stature of UT Dallas in the perceptions of the relevant university communities of a university’s stature, so as to elevate it up to match current reality, is to directly expose them to the quality of our faculties, students and facilities. A systematic program of scholarly conferences and individual visits for research talks and individual consultations with faculty and students would directly and powerfully impact visitors’ opinions of UT Dallas. Moreover, the same interactions with the larger scholarly communities would also be highly beneficial to the careers of our faculty and students. UT Dallas has several endowed annual lectures, including the Einspruch Lecture on the Holocaust, the Lecture on the History of Aviation, the Green Lecture on Systems Biology Science, the Clowes Lecture on Biology, and the Anson Clark Lecture on Science. These annual lectures are supplemented by occasional major lectures and conferences celebrating notable events in UT Dallas history, such as the major conference and large public lecture marking the 50th anniversary of the initial Texas Symposium on Relativity sponsored by the Southwest Center for Advanced Study. As the central UT Dallas strategy for increasing the national visibility of our faculty, our research programs, and our University itself, while simultaneously enhancing the quality of the education we provide students, our schools, departments, and individual research clusters will be strongly encouraged, and receive targeted support, to focus time and attention on organizing visiting lectures, workshops, symposia, specialized conferences on a regular schedule. The upcoming 50th anniversary of the creation of UT Dallas as a public university will provide a highly appropriate stimulus for fully engaging the University community in this expanded effort to tell our amazing UT Dallas story to the world.