| Dear PI Colleagues,
Please let me begin by saying that I know how difficult things have been for you and your teams these past two months. I appreciate your remarkable cooperation and effort in pausing research activities in March. I know the pause in on-campus research was frustrating and accompanied by real costs for your research programs and careers. Students and postdoctoral fellows on your teams were relying on projects to move them to the next phase of their academic or professional careers. Many of you have external funding and sponsor expectations tied to projects that needed to be navigated. Or perhaps you were making great progress with your teams and leaving your research space felt disheartening.
Research is at the core of what we do as a university, and restarting is a top priority. The safety and health of our community must be top priorities as well. Moving slowly may feel unnecessarily reactive, but a few weeks of patience now buys us substantial flexibility and stability later. In contrast, if we move too hastily without proper safeguards in place, we could experience an outbreak of infection that will force us to close our labs and research spaces again. That is what I most want to avoid.
As a PI myself, I know that the Research Restart plan has affected PIs, labs, and research trainees in many different ways. Some will have to wait longer to restart than others, which results in real inequities. I’ve also seen firsthand how my graduate students, and many of my colleagues’ students, too, have had to make hard choices about their dissertations when research was paused. They’re adapting, and our teams are keeping them productively engaged, but some will be severely affected. Knowing this makes it all the more painful not to have our spaces open at full capacity now.
At the same time, the process of reopening campus probably feels equally aggravating. We’ve been asked to modify our habits, behaviors, and procedures while drastically limiting the number of team members who can work on site. At best, this may feel difficult but necessary. At worst, it may seem unfair and inefficient.
Please know that I understand. Your work is critical and time-sensitive, and I’m advocating every day for resuming research on campus, which is why the research enterprise is the first major campus operation to resume, albeit in a limited capacity initially.
Here are some issues that I am working on with my team and members of the other Fall 2020 Planning Working Groups right now:
- Our goal is to bring more researchers onto campus safely as soon as possible this summer, and I will continue advocating for research to resume in an accelerated timeframe. That could mean loosening workforce restrictions for Research Phase 3 (which begins June 1) or even proceeding to Research Phase 2.
- For this to happen, however, several key campus-wide issues must be finalized first. For instance, to have a greater number of people working on campus requires having procedures and supplies in place for asymptomatic testing, contact tracing, and isolation to contain a COVID-19 outbreak within the UT community. The Health and Wellness Working Group is working to scale procedures as quickly as possible to accommodate a larger community of researchers on campus. We are moving forward with options to implement asymptomatic testing on campus within the coming weeks. As soon as details are confirmed, I’ll share them with you.
- In addition, coherent building management plans that account for social distancing, access, and custodial services must be designed and deployed for the more than 80 active research buildings on campus. Campus Facilities, Campus Safety, and IT teams are working with building managers and coordinators across all your colleges and schools to deploy these plans.
- Beyond our campus, we also need to understand how local conditions and virus transmission could affect our teams. We are working to establish clear criteria that will allow us to confidently move to progressively less-restrictive research phases.
- I’m in regular contact with senior research officers from AAU-member universities. We are speaking both in large groups and directly one-on-one to make sure that our reopening plans are based on the best possible evidence at that moment and that we have the opportunity to learn from one another’s experience.
- The Research Restart process is setting the tone for fall semester reopening. How safely we can work in our labs and research spaces will contribute to the ultimate plan approved by executive leadership for UT’s larger academic reopening in August.
- It’s also important to establish a path for undergraduate students to return to campus research and determine if it’s possible to do this safely before the start of the fall semester. Their trajectories are affected by the pandemic and resulting policies as well. We’re awaiting guidance from the working groups that oversee undergraduate enrollment and academics.
- Parking is also an important consideration, understandably. The current policy remains in place for the immediate future, which means that for those of you returning to campus on Monday, you may still park for free.
I know that many of you have questions and concerns, and I’d like to hear them. In the coming days, I’ll announce a virtual town hall meeting with Interim President Designate Jay Hartzell, University Health Services Executive Director Terrance Hines, and several of our associate deans for research. I want to hear about your experiences as you put our Research Restart plan’s policies and recommendations into use.
Thank you again for all that you do, and thank you, especially, for your patience and understanding. We hear so often that these are “unprecedented circumstances,” but it’s true. We are working diligently, each day, to resume our normal activities in the safest way possible. If we’re focused on keeping ourselves and our teams safe as we resume on-campus work, this initial phase of Research Restart can be a short one.
Sincerely,
| |
Alison Preston, Ph.D.
Interim Vice President for Research
| |
|
|
|
