DDemocratizing University Research
Nick S. Jones , Oscar Ces Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom and Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London,Molecular Sciences Research Hub, London W12 0BZ, United Kingdom
We detail an experimental programme we have been testing in our university. Our AdvancedHackspace attempts to give all members of the university, from students to technicians, free accessto the means to develop their own interdisciplinary research ideas, with resources including accessto specialized fellows and biological and chemical hacklabs. We assess the aspects of our programmethat led to our community being one of the largest collectives in our university and critically ex-amine the successes and failures of our trial programmes. We supply metrics for assessing progressand outline challenges. We conclude with future directions that advance interdisciplinary researchempowerment for all university members.
There is a huge opportunity to equalise access to themeans of research in universities: the bulk of univer-sity research is performed by research groups led by fac-ulty members, yet all members of universities (from un-dergraduates to technicians) can contribute to humanenquiry and progress. Given typical academic-to-non-academic ratios [1] this equalization could lead to an or-der of magnitude change in the number of researchersinside universities. Arguably the roots of the word uni-versity, speaking to a body or corporation, acknowledgea coherent ability for the members of the university toparticipate in its function. A coarse view of many mod-ern universities, however, is that academics teach and re-search and the majority of the rest of the university bodyis taught; but the distinction between research and teach-ing is delicate since research itself is a perpetual learn-ing process: teaching can be achieved by performing re-search and research-led undergraduate courses can yieldimproved outcomes [2]. Most academics are passionateabout research and learning and want to see others enjoyand exploit this process; but despite the individual senti-ments of academics, universities make it challenging forthe majority of members to autonomously pursue theirown research ideas. The challenges in democratizing re-search practice are closely linked to the challenges of in-terdisciplinary research. These challenges occur at levelsof both physical and psychological accessibility: mem-bers of a biochemistry department might (sometimes)have access to their own departmental resources but willoften have no access to electronics or machine shops; fur-ther, at the level of mind-set, scientists, young and old,can lack confidence in unfamiliar technologies from otherdisciplines even if the core skills can be rapidly acquired.Our challenge is then: how can we create courageous,practically empowered researchers, at a whole-universityscale?We believe these concerns are timely. The compelling,convergence [3] case for deeper integration of disciplinesand technologies for the goal of exploring biomedicinerequires an open university culture: supporting ad-vances from cellular-bionics [4] to precision healthcare [5]. This requires a complementary perspective to themaker/fablab/university-makerspace movement [6–8] go-ing beyond offering the baseline means of fabrication anddesign to offering the interdisciplinary means of mod-ern scientific experimentation from genetic engineeringto molecular synthesis. We stress that an experimentimaging a single cell ‘makes’ nothing but is a vital scien-tific activity. Sequencing, 3d printing and maker-spacesshould be interesting to universities because of what theysignal: cheap and/or deskilled technologies can lower thebarriers to access, making it increasingly feasible to per-form cheap research on a large scale. While there is ex-citement about the possibilities of science-based student-start-ups we suggest that exploration, learning and ex-perimentation are primitives of the university experiencewhich reach beyond the preserve of entrepreneurs; how-ever, investors and industrial support could be critical forsubstantial increases in the amount of research Univer-sities deliver. As noted, there is accumulating evidencethat active learning can be beneficial and that researchprojects can enhance student learning [2, 9, 10]; we sug-gest, like others, that while exploration and experimen-tation are vital learning tools for changing outcomes intests, it is the confidence and competence in autonomousenquiry and autonomous learning that research experi-ences provide [11] that are a key transferable skill. Wefurther suggest that, for all members, a period in uni-versity and afterwards could be an opportunity to di-rectly contribute to human knowledge and progress: au-tonomous research by all university members can be agoal in itself rather than exclusively a means to an ed-ucational end . We thus consider a system that allowsall university members autonomous access to the meansto perform research outside either faculty-led researchprojects or faculty-led courses.We have observed two barriers to empowering the au-tonomous research of non-academic members of univer-sities: access to laboratory resources [12] and the confi-dence required to experiment and self-teach. With thegoal of providing a case-study for others we outline ourinterdiscipliary programme to address this, the Advanced a r X i v : . [ phy s i c s . e d - ph ] J un Hackspace, and critically assess which parts of our trialprogrammes succeeded and failed.
A simple framework for democratizing universityresearch:
The Advanced Hackspace was started in May 2014and, before all university members became auto-enrolled(for free) in Oct. 2017, we had 2,300 members [13]. Weare staffed by a manager, administrator, community of-ficer, commercial engagement officer and ∼ > >
860 sq ft Molecular Hack-ing space (joint with Chemistry) is now being assem-bled, and in our other campus is an electronics space(750 sq ft, joint with Electrical Engineering). The Ad-vanced Hackspace hub is a single door away from an out-reach oriented coummunity-makerspace. We offer andsupport courses, hang-outs, competitions and large-scalehackathons and provide competitive seed-corn funding.We support idea development ranging from prototypingwith electronics or wood-metalwork/additive manufac-ture (as might be seen in an engineering-oriented mak-erspace [7, 8]) through to hypothesis-led live-cell imagingexperiments and molecular synthesis (as might be seenin an experimental laboratory in the natural sciences).‘Making’ is thus too narrow a term for the activities wesupport: idea development, with its implicit experimen-tation and exploration, has proved more natural. ‘Inno-vation’ is also too narrow: we cover research, inventionand innovation.The essence of our Advanced Hackspaceis our community of members and the ideas and skillsthey develop and exchange Fig. 1.
A passport system as a tool for fast scale-up:
Our growth across spaces and in numbers can be at-tributed to: the enthusiasm of our founding staff; demandfrom university members for equipment outside their dis-ciplines; departmental and institutional support; openingour hub space; and the early assistance of a Hackers-in-
WaterBox: A Testbed for Monitoring and Controlling Smart Water NetworksCost-effective rapid prototyping and assembly of poly(methyl methacrylate) microfluidic devicesEthoscopes: An open platform for high-throughput ethomics'' membership by Faculty:1:2.9:8.2Medicine: Natural Sciences: EngineeringGender: 39:61Female:Male by career stage:1:1.8:10:15.9Academic: Non-academic staff (inc.PDRAs): Graduate studies:Undergraduates
GyroGear: Stabilising the lives of those with hand tremorsFresh Check: Confirming Cleanliness with Colour Changeideabatic: a smart vaccine cooling system
Interdisciplinary Scientific Projects: Interdisciplinary Startups:Makeup:
FIG. 1: Accelerating interdisciplinary research by empower-ing all university members: showing (left) cross-departmentaland career stage mixing; (centre) example scientific publica-tions [14–16]; (right) interdisciplinary start-ups.
Residence programme that brought in skills gratis. Akey element that allowed us to cross between depart-ments, and so grow, was to develop a passport system.Each new space we add to our network is based on a bi-lateral agreement led by the departmental space-ownerswhere, guided by precedent, they establish the kind ofusage they find acceptable. Users then need to meet thesafety requirements of each space in a manner akin toacquiring visas for different countries in a passport. Thesystem is crude in that it requires repeated inductions forthe different spaces and it produces heterogeneity in thekinds of access different users can have to each space. Itdoes, however, have the virtue of being rapidly scalablewithout requiring a centralized mandate. Unsurprisingly,good relationships are critical for this co-use model butwe found, consonant with an open-model being a stim-ulus, that the technicians tasked with running each uni-versity space are often our biggest supporters.
Techniques to enhance cross-disciplinary access:
It has been argued that autonomy is a primitive ofhealth and happiness [17, 18] but for our potential re-searchers to exploit the apparently free opportunities weoffered we needed to remove barriers to yield equitableoutcomes [19]. We found that beyond being able to ac-cess resources for research, the other limiting factor wasconfidence: the self-belief required to experiment outsidedisciplinary comfort zones.University culture is oriented around progress in as-sessed activities, from exams to projects, and we found itvital to identify mechanisms through which our memberscould gain credit for undertaking autonomous projects.We exploited both Imperial’s intramural courses (whichoffer degree-credit) and also integrated with a numberof undergraduate/graduate degree courses. By thesemeans, we could begin a culture-shift, from autonomousresearch being a free-time activity to being a core partof the university experience. In complement to this, anddriven by demand, we shifted from operating 9-5 to oper-ating some of our spaces 12-8pm: this allows those withcourses/employment during the day to nonetheless pur-sue their own projects in the evening. Both integrationinto courses and into free-time allowed a more relaxed en-gagement with the opportunities we offer, thereby easingthe challenge to confidence presented by our interdisci-plinary framework.A further challenge has been the distinction betweenbeing a facility with users and a community with mem-bers. In our early months of operation our members ex-pected our core staff to fix their technical problems andclear jammed equipment etc.. This is rational: other uni-versity organs like libraries and gyms are run like facilitiesrather than communities and fee-paying college membersmight expect the same from the Advanced Hackspace.Since the opportunities we provide are inherently techni-cal, our staff can never be sufficiently large to provide afacility-like level of support; further a facility expects itsusers to operate independently by contrast we specif-ically seek to foster interdisciplinary sharing of skillsand ideas in a community of researchers. Community-building in a university environment, the majority ofwhom will leave within 3-4 years, is a challenge. Assuch we have found an emphasis on co-ownership of themeans of research has been particularly important: like-wise community-building events like recurring hangouts,a Slack channel, our provision of a hang-out mixing-spaceand clear branding. Each interaction with our membersby our core team emphasises that they co-own our re-source and that, unlike in a facility, they must give backas much as they take.
A catalytic role for small-scale support:
We have run twice-yearly competitions for project-support prizes of £ − Linking skilled interdisciplinary fellows to research:
Our fellows are highly skilled cross-disciplinary re-searchers that support the idea development of our com-munity: giving technical and project advice; support-ing our spaces; and delivering our courses and events.Our fellows also have the task of researching and test-ing/evaluating technologies and protocols which can themselves accelerate the function of our community. Ex-amples of these range from new protocols for hackathonsthrough ways of performing high-resolution 3d printingusing low-resolution devices. Consonant with the chal-lenge of creating a new culture we found that it was vi-tal to have a clear onboarding process for our new fel-lows because the activities expected of them blending re-search, teaching and equipment mastery inevitably pre-sented challenges to new starters from any one discipline.
Exploiting events for interdisciplinary mixing:
We have found that hackathons (from COPD toVoiceTech [20, 21]) have been critical for mixing acrossdisciplines, for creating a focussed environment in whichconfidence in experimenting can be fostered and forbridging to industry. Others have outlined advice forthe delivery of hackathons [22, 23] but we found that a3-month run-up was required for organizing a large-scaleevent with careful timing in the year if undergraduatesare attending. Week-long showcasing events, advertis-ing the ideas developed by our community helped mem-bers get idea feedback. From experimental seminar serieswe learned that: 1) that there is substantial interest incourses in mid-level technologies (from micro-fluidics todeep-sequencing) which are found in only a few under-graduate programmes and 2) that conventional lectureswere poorly attended and could have been supplied byother parts of the universities. We thus moved to exclu-sively participatory events that required active learningand community building.
Advantages of an open culture:
As an explicitly interdisciplinary effort we have bridgeddepartmental barriers, however, we discovered a keytrade-off which we did not anticipate in advance: be-tween successfully exploiting the advantages of scale andbecoming an exclusive monoculture. A large universitymust contain a diversity of efforts to realize the same out-comes and occasionally some parts of the university havereplicated our efforts while other members of our uni-versity have attempted to outsource or privatise similarefforts. Our view became that we would seek to facilitate,collaborate with, and co-brand those activities that wereopen to the whole community, to foster and stimulateindependent and analogous new efforts by others, and todisengage with efforts which actively raised barriers toaccess for our community.
Definition by safety and our operating metrics:
Creating new opportunities for research for a muchlarger body of researchers has implications for safety: assuch safety is our stated principal strategic priority. Ourapproach is to have safety being synonymous with the
Percentage of members reporting:that ICAH is ‘safe’ or ‘very safe’Percentage of members reporting:they have helped or trained othermembers.Percentage of members reporting:they have formed new partnershipsand collaborations through ICAHGender ratio compared to universityEvents per yearHours of training and coursesNumber of internal start-ups in productdevelopment.Secure applications for at least 50teams towards our grant programmeDemonstrating support of 30 minimalviable products or inventionsFellows to develop 3 new publishableprotocols or technologiesNumber of papers acknowledging ICAHTABLE I: Operating metrics indicating our goal to createan equitable self-helping community performing research andinnovation
Advanced Hackspace encouraging a near-miss-reportingculture and drawing on best practice from elsewhere [24].We share some of our operating metrics in Table 1.We will be running bi-annual surveys of our membershipand we will shortly be asking not only about membersbut also about their friends. This will allow us to studyhomophily amongst our members and to make compar-isons to University members that are not actively partic-ipating in our network; in particular we will be able toidentify if interdisciplinary friendships are more commonamong our members and to investigate gender homophilyeffects.
Discussion and the Future:
Beyond our continuing community-development andacquisition of new research technologies, we are testingnew experimental programmes. The events/programmesthat we currently run can cater for tens to a hundredparticipants; as such there is something exclusive aboutthem: selectively investing in a few rather than the full ∼ [1] Link to: Profile of the Russell Group[2] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, andMedicine, 2015. Integrating discovery-based research intothe undergraduate curriculum: Report of a convocation.National Academies Press.[3] Sharp, P. and Hockfield, S., 2017. Convergence: the fu-ture of health. Science, 355(6325), pp.589-589.[4] Beales, P.A., Ciani, B., Mann, S., 2018 The artificialcell: biology-inspired compartmentalization of chemicalfunction. Interface Focus 8 20180046.[5] Colijn, C., Jones, N., Johnston, I.G., Yaliraki, S. andBarahona, M., 2017. Toward precision healthcare: con-text and mathematical challenges. Frontiers in physiol-ogy, 8, p.136.[6] Mikhak, B., Lyon, C., Gorton, T., Gershenfeld, N.,McEnnis, C. and Taylor, J., 2002, December. Fab Lab:an alternate model of ICT for development. In 2nd in-ternational conference on open collaborative design forsustainable innovation.[7] Barrett, T., Pizzico, M., Levy, B.D., Nagel, R.L., Linsey,J.S., Talley, K.G., Forest, C.R. and Newstetter, W.C.,2015. A review of university maker spaces. Georgia Insti-tute of Technology.[1] Link to: Profile of the Russell Group[2] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, andMedicine, 2015. Integrating discovery-based research intothe undergraduate curriculum: Report of a convocation.National Academies Press.[3] Sharp, P. and Hockfield, S., 2017. Convergence: the fu-ture of health. Science, 355(6325), pp.589-589.[4] Beales, P.A., Ciani, B., Mann, S., 2018 The artificialcell: biology-inspired compartmentalization of chemicalfunction. Interface Focus 8 20180046.[5] Colijn, C., Jones, N., Johnston, I.G., Yaliraki, S. andBarahona, M., 2017. Toward precision healthcare: con-text and mathematical challenges. Frontiers in physiol-ogy, 8, p.136.[6] Mikhak, B., Lyon, C., Gorton, T., Gershenfeld, N.,McEnnis, C. and Taylor, J., 2002, December. Fab Lab:an alternate model of ICT for development. In 2nd in-ternational conference on open collaborative design forsustainable innovation.[7] Barrett, T., Pizzico, M., Levy, B.D., Nagel, R.L., Linsey,J.S., Talley, K.G., Forest, C.R. and Newstetter, W.C.,2015. A review of university maker spaces. Georgia Insti-tute of Technology.