Two of the country’s leading research universities have signed on as new members of the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS): the University of Kentucky and Arizona Sate University
With a combined sponsored research volume of more than $1 billion, the new members will bring the total research award spending represented in the IRIS-UMETRICS dataset to more than $100 billion. With nearly 100 campuses, IRIS member universities account for 40% of total federal spending on academic research and development.
“We’re very pleased to welcome our new members into the IRIS family,” said Jason Owen-Smith, IRIS Executive Director, Professor of Sociology, and Executive Director for Research Analytics at the University of Michigan. “Our new members’ data on their research operations will be a significant contribution to the IRIS dataset. And we trust IRIS reports and access to our data will be a positive contribution to their efforts to understand, explain and improve the public value of research and higher education.”
IRIS provides members with reports on the economic and workforce development impacts of their research spending. Faculty at member institutions also have no-cost access to the IRIS dataset for research purposes.
“ASU chose to join IRIS because of the increased potential for insights that will aid strategic decision support, as well as access to otherwise unavailable and unstandardized datasets,” said Hansa Magee, Associate Director of Knowledge Enterprise Analytics at Arizona State University. “We also wanted to contribute to the corpus of data available for researchers so that additional studies can be done with a larger sample size to improve higher education and research.”
“The University of Kentucky is excited about the opportunities ahead to explore the impact our innovation, research, and discoveries have on the Commonwealth and beyond,” said Baron Wolf, Assistant Vice President for Research Strategy and Data Analytics at the University of Kentucky. “As members of the IRIS community, we hope to explore how the work we do in our laboratories, creative spaces, and throughout the community have an impact on economic development and growth. As a land-grant institution, our research focus is to explore innovative solutions to solving the problems of Kentucky and beyond—being a member of IRIS will help us achieve these goals as we continue to be the University FOR Kentucky.”
Please visit our membership page for more information on joining IRIS.