Ranu Jung: A Vision and Dream for the Future
Andy Albertson: Welcome to Short Talks from the Hill, a research and economic development podcast of the University of Arkansas. I’m Andy Albertson. The Institute for Integrative and Innovative Research, or I3R, was established by a landmark $194.7 million grant from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation. I’m joined today by the founding executive director of I3R, Dr. Ranu Jung. Ranu joined U of A in December 2021 and serves as an endowed chair, Distinguished Professor of biomedical engineering and associate vice chancellor. Welcome.
Ranu Jung: Thank you, Andy, I’m delighted to be here.
AA: Well, I’d like to start off by learning… what is I3R?
RJ: What is I3R? I3R is a vision, I3R is a dream, I3R is a future. And I believe that I3R is, as it says, integrative, bringing all people together, not just within the university, but bringing all our community together, all our stakeholders together in a common vision, a common dream to grow Northwest Arkansas, to grow the state of Arkansas, and to impact the entire nation, and ultimately by its research and its innovations, it will have a global impact.
AA: Who are the kinds of people that you hope will join I3R?
RJ: I think people with passion, people who believe that what they do is going to make a change, people who want to make a societal impact for now and for future generations. People who are willing to take risks, who are willing to think outside the box, and are willing to bring in different ideas, different thought processes together, in this diversity of imagination, an ability to converge ideas, connect the dots that are not obviously connected, and work together to achieve a common mission to solve a common effort to solve a big grand challenge that they can’t do it themselves, but are willing to embrace others in that path. Long answer, very long answer.
AA: Great answer. When you talk about a grand challenge… I understand that there is an initial grand challenge for I3R. Could you talk a little bit about that and some of the research areas that will contribute to that grand challenge?
RJ: When this institute was conceived, the vision was put together, it grew out of a thoughtful process that had happened, and there had been this analysis done of what would it take to make this heartland area, this Northwest Arkansas area, blossom and grow forward. So building on all the other things that are happening here, whether it’s the arts, the Crystal Bridges Art Museum, for example, that has happened, the growing health sector, the strength of the food sector that is here, the extensive excellence in the supply chain logistics pathway… So food, data sciences, the growing health care part, there was a vision to pull together all of that to form this institute. So then the question for us was how do we take all of these different clusters of innovation? And how do we converge them and what do we do about converging them to address what I said earlier, a bigger problem that not individuals or not individual groups could do. So we should come up with some kind of a grand challenge and then think about what is it that is absolutely relevant to Arkansans, to our nation and is, perhaps, really a global problem. And something that popped up after all these discussions that I had with other people and looking at all these other reports and these chancellors, fellows who had put together the initial ideas and concepts and thought processes for these different growth areas was metabolic health. Each one of us has a different metabolic health. It’s not just our genes; it is also our environment, and it is also our daily life, our sleep habits, our… what we eat, how do we exercise, what is our mental health? All of that decides what our… each individual’s metabolic health is. So in order to keep ourselves healthy, keep ourselves from… for sustaining a good quality of life, for individuals and the community, it would behoove us to pay attention to the metabolic health of both individuals and their communities. How can we do that? We can promote it by, for example, eating the right foods and doing activity, which is of course exercise. It’s everything from riding those bikes that, you know, we love and the Ozarks allow us to do with all the mountain bicycling that we love, but it’s also what you might do in planning the city so that people are walking to places or planning even buildings, as the architecture dean has told me, there are some things called well design criteria, just like there’s LEED design criteria, of how do you design spaces. And all of us went through… I think in the past two years many of us have started standing at our desk. We didn’t do that for a long time, but this is all little things that all contribute to promoting good metabolic health. And then it’s the question of sustaining it. So sustaining it is again, you have food, you have got exercise in activity, but it is also your whole health and your whole self. Are you having the right sleep patterns? Are you keeping your stress levels in place? But things go awry and they’re going awry for millions of people. We have diabetes, we have obesity, we have cardiovascular diseases. We have mental health issues that are coming along with it. So when your metabolic health is not okay, then you have many of these complications. So that obviously gives us an opportunity not only to think about food and think about our exercise and all of that, but also interventions, and those interventions might mean behavioral interventions, but also interventions to work to improve or to address the problems that come with that. So that might mean technologies, drugs, devices, therapies. That might… say you get wounds with diabetes that don’t heal well. Are there smart materials that might help you get smart dressings, smart materials that might help faster wound healing? Or you might end up with amputations or your consequences, I’m just picking one particular disease, diabetes, right? You have neuropathies that affect your neural control of your bladder, your gut, and so there are… your eyes. So, are there ways in which we might have interventions for that? All of that, if we are going to do this entire part way of supporting metabolic health or addressing metabolic health, then whatever we do, whatever discoveries we make, whatever drug discoveries or technologies that we have or food that we draw up, all of that must then be taken, deployed, so to speak, into the community. And so we must understand, do we have the right ways of getting things to the people, to the different communities through the different stakeholders? Do we have policies that would allow things to actually make a societal impact? Have we done an economic analysis of what would it mean to be able to achieve that or to be able to implement those? And then the question is, is it just going to be just local? Or is it going to be at the state at the national or global level. So that’s the circle that I think about – societal impact, discoveries, design and broadband delivery and deployment.
AA: So this institute will not be just about making those discoveries, it’s about taking those discoveries to society.
RJ: Yes, actually what we are going to be is much more the latter in the sense that there are many times institutes are focused on fundamental research. We will do fundamental research, but we are absolutely committed to making sure that any discoveries or any technology developments or things like that, that we might design in drugs, are being delivered, because the only way we can have societal impact, if they are delivered to the commercial market, to the clinics. But they have to get out so we need to make sure that economic development goes hand in hand with this former, because without economic development and without the ability to translate and take these not just to one small company or to one small clinic… But at scale, that’s the only way you have societal impact. It’s not a question of one family being impacted, or one individual being impacted. But if you really want really large societal impact, then this is a continuous loop. You cannot just say we are doing discovery and somebody else is responsibility it is to translate it, and then somebody else is going to take the responsibility of taking what is translated and getting it commercialized. We… it’s a very big, very big dream, in a way, and a very, probably a very difficult task, and some may question the wisdom of taking on this whole cycle, but we are in a unique place. We are in Northwest Arkansas, where we have large anchor companies who are global. We have a fast-growing ecosystem for economic development, deals with smaller companies. We have a passion for making things happen. So we’re in this place… and we can afford to dream this dream that we are not just about fundamental science, we are actually not even just about translating, but we are actually about closing the chain for making sure there is economic development happening hand in hand, and it doesn’t stop at that. We put in place the social structures to be able to have societal impact, and we’re a land grant university, our commitment is to our people. That is part of who we are. Hundred and fifty years of that, you know. So, across the state, we will be committed to our land-grant mission at the same time.
AA: So how do you see I3R evolving over, say, the next 10 years?
RJ: There are many steps to be taken, so we are coming up from the ground up. I’ll go back again that we have a beautiful blueprint or thought process because we are not alone in doing this. We have already a community of multiple stakeholders who scaffold the institute. Now with this scaffolding comes… some aspects is just putting action items to making actual things happen. There’s a building coming up. That building is going to have the right kind of project spaces to be able to do the fundamental research and also offer opportunities for the small companies that the Northwest Arkansas Council, for example, is working to bring in here. Bring talent in, bring people in, bring companies in. We would offer the resources to them. So what will happen in five to 10 years is we would be able to offer an ecosystem to these starting companies, and to the faculty and researchers and to our clinical partners. To be able to do that whole that pipeline, research design and development, right, and moving it forward? So we will offer actual physical, unique capabilities. The other thing that we will have done is we will have offered, think-tank capabilities, so to speak, right? And so that starts to happen with more researchers as we bring in talent. So talent bringing in… is also talent. Bringing in of faculty of researchers, clinicians who might move into this area but want to have an academic home also. We are able to give them a research space for them to participate in, right? So small businesses that are starting their businesses cannot afford the very expensive equipment. We will have that ability. Or they need some regulatory support and structure. We can offer that. So before they will have to shell out a large amount of funding for international CRO or somebody like that, they could come to us. We will be there to help support them both in technical capabilities and also in advice capability. So this is what I see happening in the next three to five years… is building spaces and building people capabilities. So attracting the right set of people who can offer support and who themselves are thinking of a future with that common mission of achieving what we want to do, which is, in the end, societal impact. And that is what is when I say driven by purpose, that is our purpose.
AA: That’s great. I’m excited to see everything that’s going to happen in the next couple of years and decades to come.
RJ: Thank you so much. It is such a pleasure to be here. Every day I wake up thinking, really this is happening, and I am so, so delighted that there is a whole community, as I said, scaffolding this future vision.
Matt McGowan: Music for Short Talks from the Hill was written and performed by local musician Ben Harris. For more information and additional podcasts, visit Arkansas Research. That’s arkansasresearch.uark.edu, the home of science and research news at the University of Arkansas.
