The NC Collaboratory is now part of that.” (Courtesy of the NC Collaboratory) Nimble, efficient, fastīefore the NC Collaboratory, plenty of research at Carolina and other UNC System schools addressed practical issues in the state. Those are the laws that establish the UNC System. ![]() When you take down the big green statute books from the shelf, we’re there in article 31a of General Statutes 116-255. “Before, our authorizations and directives were spread across numerous session laws,” Warren said. More than half of that total came from appropriations made in last November’s state budget, another vote of confidence from the General Assembly.įor Warren, however, who has a doctorate in marine geology and geophysics from Carolina and spent 15 years doing state-level science policy work in North Carolina, the clearest stamp of approval came when the legislature voted in November to codify the Collaboratory. It has received more than $145 million in legislative appropriations - funding that otherwise would not have entered the UNC System. To date, the Collaboratory has or will soon fund more than 300 projects across all 17 campuses in the UNC System. Headquartered at Carolina, the NC Collaboratory conducts both legislatively mandated research, like the PFAS work and a diverse portfolio of COVID-19 related research, as well as ideas that originate from Collaboratory staff and advisory board members, including landslide mapping in Western North Carolina and the public health impacts of Hurricane Matthew along the coast.Īt the beginning of February, the NC Collaboratory marked its five-year anniversary with a report recapping its many successes and looking ahead at what’s next. Al Segars, NC Collaboratory chair, PNC Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Kenan-Flagler Business School “The North Carolina Collaboratory is unlike any other research center that’s been created by any university.” Since then, the name was shortened to NC Collaboratory. In 2020, the legislature permitted partnerships with private colleges and universities. The PFAS response serves as the perfect example of why the General Assembly created the NC Policy Collaboratory in 2016 - to put the research expertise of the University of North Carolina System to work for the benefit of the state. The legislators were so impressed they recently made an additional $10 million investment in scaling up the resin technology for testing under real-world conditions at water and wastewater treatment plants. Work by Carolina chemist Frank Leibfarth and engineer Orlando Coronell led to a promising new ionic fluorogel resin that removes PFAS from water at a far greater efficacy than other available technologies. They conducted water sampling, air sampling, private well risk modeling, PFAS removal testing and more. Nineteen different researchers on eight teams put a full-court press on the PFAS problem. With that money and additional appropriations, not to mention the millions of federal grant dollars leveraged by these investments, the Collaboratory created the North Carolina PFAS Testing Network, comprised of principal investigators from seven universities - Duke, East Carolina University, NC A&T State University, NC State University, UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC Charlotte and UNC Wilmington. But I also knew that we had to perform because that was, and continues to be, such a high-profile issue.” “That was when I knew we were going to be called on by our legislature to address complicated issues in North Carolina that required scientific research. “That was our first large-scale project involving multiple universities,” said Warren, the Collaboratory’s executive director. It was the summer of 2018, and the North Carolina General Assembly had just appropriated $5 million for a statewide study of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), including GenX, a potentially toxic industrial PFAS compound detected in the Cape Fear River. Jeff Warren remembers the moment the North Carolina Collaboratory turned the corner, when he thought, Yes, this is going to work. ![]() Clockwise from top left: Genome Science Building, home of the NC Collaboratory (UNC-Chapel Hill) Frank Leibfarth in the lab (Melanie Busbee/UNC-Chapel Hill) student Rhyan Stone and UNC Institute for the Environment research technician Aleah Walsh collect water samples from local watersheds feeding into Jordan Lake (Megan May/UNC Research) Rachel Noble in her lab (UNC-Chapel Hill). Five years in, the innovative policy model has proven enormously effective at turning state funds into life-changing research.
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