Chancellor Cartwright announces new MU initiatives

Today, University of Missouri’s Chancellor Alexander Cartwright announced new initiatives designed to boost research and creative activities on campus.

It marks Cartwright’s seventh month at the university. He has a goal to make the University a premier Midwestern institution.

“We want people to be looking to us and going, ‘they’re innovative, they’re the university that we want to work with, they’re the university that gets it.’ We can have people connected across all disciplines and tackling really complex problems and that’s what we want to be known as,” said Chancellor Cartwright.

His initiatives are as follows:

Academy of Curators Professors – Establish curator’s distinguished professors academy that will serve as a resource for the university in providing guidance and mentorship to students and faculty. Artist in Residence Program – Invite visual and performance artists, musicians, dance scholars and other professional to the campus to share their skill with faculty, staff, and students. Mizzou Innovates Program – Annual competition to focus on bringing students, faculty, and staff together in identifying and solving problems in Missouri and the world. National Research Centers – Work to attract three to five externally funded national research centers in the next five years. Office of Research Advancement – Establish an office that will provide the infrastructure to help target large multi-investigator research grants. Double NIH and Industry Sponsored Clinical Trials Funding – Double funding for clinical trials to provide Missourians with groundbreaking technologies.

ABC 17 spoke with students today and they are in favor of their Chancellor’s plan.

An undergraduate medical student told us, “I think one of the underappreciated things about research is how much a student is able to learn through it, it gives us a way to actually apply what we’ve been learning in school for so many years to a real world setting and see our work actually benefit something.”

University of Missouri said that for every one dollar they receive, they have an eleven-times return rate. Mizzou researchers bring in more than $200 million in outside funding to Missouri every year.

The Chancellor told ABC 17, by doubling research funding, it will bring more inventions, which will bring new technologies and companies and ultimately lead to more jobs, thus boosting Missouri’s economy in the long-run.

He also says expanding the arts and humanities is a strategy to bring more people to Mid-Missouri.