Claude R. Canizares

INTERVIEWER: Today is July 16, 2010. I am Karen Arenson.

We are speaking today with Claude Canizares, the vice president for research at MIT, as well as associate provost, and Bruno Rossi professor of physics.

Claude has overall responsibility for research activity and policy at MIT, and oversees more than a dozen interdisciplinary research labs and centers. Including the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Broad Institute, and Haystack observatory, as well as centers that focus on nanotechnology, magnets, and health sciences, to name just a few.

He also heads MIT's research policy committee and is associate director of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, and a principle investigator on NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. He formerly headed MIT's Center for Space Research, now the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Claude, welcome and thank you for talking with us this morning.

CANIZARES: Thank you. It's a pleasure.

INTERVIEWER: America's fascination with space has changed over the years. What was it like when you started your research and how would you describe it now?

CANIZARES: Well, I started my research in space astronomy and astrophysics, actually, just as I left graduate school, since my graduate studies were in elementary particle physics. It was really one of the most exciting times, I think, still in space exploration. Because it was in the early 1970s, and it was really the beginning, in many ways, of the explosion of scientific satellites going into low earth orbit, and in fact, out into the solar system.

So everything was a discovery. I mean every week would bring some new surprise. Of course, in those days we weren't receiving emails and instant tweets on whatever might be the latest discovery. We'd have to wait for the mailman to bring the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal or a batch of pre-prints. When those came, the first thing you would do is grab it and open it up and look and see what surprise had been found. So it was a great time.

INTERVIEWER: America was pouring a lot of money into space research at that point?

CANIZARES: It was a significant amount of money. Of course, we'd come off the peak of the Apollo program, which was a time when -- it's still the time when the US spent more on civilian space activities than it has since. That was the apotheosis in certainly a budgetary sense and in the sense of the sort of public engagement in what we were doing. But it being actually quite strategic and spending significant amounts of research funds, but doing it, I think, quite wisely.

There was a series of campaigns in various parts of the sort of spectrum of possibilities for space exploration. And MIT, of course, was very much in the middle of several of those. That was one of the reasons why it was so exciting. It was happening all around us -- in the Center for Space Research and in our collaborations with people at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics up the street, and other collaborators that we were working with.

INTERVIEWER: Given that you had focused on particle physics and then moved, was there a sort of eureka moment that made you think, ah, this is really what I want to focus on? Did you wake up one day and suddenly say the skies?

CANIZARES: It would be romantic to have such a thing. I could probably make one up if I wanted to. But the truth is more prosaic. I had been very interested in particle physics starting in undergraduate days and went through graduate school doing that. But during that time the nature the field changed, and my interests sort of wandered. I realized that I wasn't so sure I wanted to work in that area.

While it's still a very exciting area, it's one that got centered in a few very large laboratories, none of which were in Cambridge. It would involve going either to FermiLab in Illinois, or SLAC in California, or CERN in Switzerland, and working in very, very large teams. So the sociology of the field was less attractive, and also at that point the field had kind of stagnated a little bit. Nobody really knew what experiments to do. It was in a difficult stage. The quark had not quite been definitively discovered at that point.

So I started looking around for other things that I might do. It happened to be a time, it was very difficult for a PhD physicist to get a job. It's probably the lowest point in the history of employment. So I looked around for a variety of things that I thought might be attractive, and I was extraordinarily lucky that George Clark, here at MIT, was at that point engaged in some new satellite experiments that he wanted to build. He interviewed me, and I was almost going to accept a job somewhere else, and decided at the last minute to give him one more call. He said well, why don't you come down and see me one more time and he offered me a job. So it was serendipity as much as design.

INTERVIEWER: But the process of looking around, which is something I think lots of people experience, how did you go about it? Did you read, or did you talk to professors up at Harvard?

CANIZARES: Well, I did. So I was a graduate student at Harvard and an undergraduate. I had some very good years there. My own advisor knew nothing about sort of cosmic ray or space physics. But he sent me to see another MIT alum, actually, Giovanni Fazio, who was at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Giovanni, whom I've gotten to know now, is a good friend and just a wonderful human being, was incredibly generous in speaking to me and giving me suggestions about whom to write to, and even allowing me to mention that he had sent me there.

Because at that point, I mean I probably sent out easily 100 letters. The majority of which were never answered. But the fact that he let me put his name in there probably made a few people read through it to the end at least that might not otherwise have done it. So mentorship was very important in that sense. And then he didn't know me from Adam, but he was very generous.

INTERVIEWER: And he connected you to George Clark?

CANIZARES: George was one of the people that he had suggested I talk to. So then I came down and met with him once, and then I never heard from him and he didn't get back to me until I called one more time and I said look, I have to accept this job, which was actually in a slightly different field, it was in cosmic ray physics -- doing experiments on the detection of cosmic rays deep underground in a mine in Utah. So that would have been a very different future for me, I think, if I had to take that fork in the road.

INTERVIEWER: If young people were to ask you today whether they should enter astrophysics now, what would you tell them?

CANIZARES: I still think astrophysics is -- in fact, now in some ways it's an even more exciting place in some respects. In others it's actually difficult. I'm not so enthralled with the way NASA has been conducting space science these days. I think the pace of new projects has slowed somewhat. So I'm concerned about that.

On the other hand, intellectually, we couldn't be at a more exciting place. The discoveries of a whole variety of, both on the ground, but particularly in space, have allowed us to talk about things like cosmology, the whole evolution of the universe with the word precision. In the old days precision cosmology would have been an oxymoron because we didn't know the age of the universe to at least a factor of two, if not more. And a lot of other properties of the universe we didn't know to a factor of 100. Now we are talking about those things with accuracies of two or three significant figures.

So, the understanding of the content of the universe and its evolution has really leap-frogged in the last, I'd say two decades. So, it's a very exciting time. But one has to be, again, somewhat strategic in choosing areas, and in finding one's place in this. Because the funding situation right now across the world is a little difficult. But when I came out of graduate school, as I said, it was very, very hard to get a job. It wasn't obvious at that point that there was a future. I was thinking of the possibly that I might go into industry rather than academia because of that. So there are ups and downs all the time. I would say follow your passion. If you have the passion, then really follow it. Certainly people at MIT will have the option to create their careers.

INTERVIEWER: It sounds like when you were graduating with your doctorate, that what you were passionate about maybe was the research process and science more than the particle physics per se?

CANIZARES: That's very perceptive, because I think that is really exactly the case. I've always had rather broad interests, and even in my general field of X-ray astonomy and astronomy generally. I have not been one of those to bore down in exactly one area and become the world's expert on supernova explosions or some such thing. Rather I've tended to move around, or, in fact, simultaneously work in several different fields. I sometimes tell my students that I have intellectual attention deficit disorder because I'm not content to just stay in one area. I love digging into something at one point, but then at some point something else attracts my attention and I like to be able to work in that.

One of the wonderful things about MIT is the fact that it's a very intellectually open environment. You can go and talk to people about their work, and sometimes get invited in and sometimes collaborate just on the basis of casual conversations rather than which department and school are you a member of, or what degree do you have. So that has been something that also characterizes what I do.

So when I finished particle physics -- I mean not finished, but when I decided that was probably not where I wanted to continue my career, I had a number of things that looked interesting. It was kind of a mixture of opportunity and a demand side and supply side, so to speak, and I was looking for the right connection there. I think I was extraordinarily fortunate to come into a field that was so exciting. I think if I'd ended up in that mine in Utah, it probably would not have been as exciting and I would have ended up doing something else in the long run anyway.

INTERVIEWER: So was becoming vice president for research at MIT like being handed a candy store? Are you the kid in the candy store--?

CANIZARES: Well, in many ways that's exactly right. So over time, my sphere of regard, if you like, has increased. As the director of the Center for Space Research, I got to interact, again, with a wider group of people, and I spent a lot of time on various committees in Washington, and so forth, like the Space Studies Board of the National Academies of Sciences and the NASA Advisory Counsel. So in each of those cases, there I progressively got to think about and interact with people from all across the space sciences. Not only NASA, actually, also NOAA and other agencies.

Then when I went into the central administration, first as associate provost, and then as vice president for research and associate provost, each time I'm learning more and more about MIT. One of the things I will say that I enjoyed about MIT is this openness that I was describing before -- another thing I started doing fairly early in my academic career was getting on some Institute-wide committees. That got me to know and to become, actually in some cases, close friends with faculty from all different departments and schools.

That was the start maybe of another place where I had broader horizons and realized that I enjoyed that kind of interaction. Being vice president for research is, for me, the best job in the world in many ways because I get to see the whole scope of wonderful discoveries. I can tell you, I learn something new every day. Usually more than one thing.

INTERVIEWER: So as VP for research, what do you actually do on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis?

CANIZARES: Well, there's a long list of things I can tell you. Mostly I have meetings non-stop from morning till night, and then sometimes dinners or evening meetings as well. More to the point, I deal with things in several different buckets, but then there's a distribution of them. So I have some line management responsibilities for the research labs and centers, particularly those that are interdisciplinary and cross schools. Frankly, we have an excellent cadre of directors of these labs and centers. They operate very well. But there's a continual need at various times for my participation in decisions or in oversight.

Then there's the area of research policy, and these days a lot of that involves things around technology transfer, conflict of interest in the starting of new companies, for example. We are very active in that area. And there's a huge interest in Washington for a whole set of policy issues that intersect with MIT, these days particularly around innovation.

With the economy in the condition that it's in, there are many people in Washington looking very much to MIT as probably the outstanding model, not just in the country but in the world, for a university that can transfer the fruits of its knowledge to the corporate sector in the economy in the most effective way. They would like us to help them transfer this to other places and to do it more actively ourselves. So, I spend a lot of time on those activities, both within MIT, and outside on national committees. I'm on several simultaneously.

Then there's just the general issue of relationships with our research sponsors, both corporate industrial sponsors, and we have, again, compared to most universities, we are really outstanding in our ability to engage industrial sponsors. Not just to get their money, which of course is important to keep the research activity going, but to have their interest and involvement so that our students and faculty understand what are the leading issues that are important to them, so that the research -- not to direct the research on a detailed basis, but to make sure it's operating in a direction that can be of use and have impact on them.

Then, of course, our federal sponsors, still over 70 percent of our research funding comes from the federal government. There's a continual need to just maintain our relationships with federal agencies. So those are some of the broad areas, and then within those, of course, we could get down into the weeds, but I don't think you want to do that.

INTERVIEWER: It sounds like four or five jobs in one.

CANIZARES: As I said, it's great for someone with attention deficit disorder, because I can always jump from one to other whenever I get bored.

INTERVIEWER: Do you sleep?

CANIZARES: Well, these days one of the other things we're doing is a lot of international engagements. A number of the major ones report to me, or at least in their establishment I play a role. So, in fact, I've just gotten back from three separate overseas trips. So that's a fair point. I don't always sleep very well.

INTERVIEWER: Where were you visiting?

CANIZARES: We had a delegation travel to Russia at the beginning of June. Then I had a short trip to Italy for one of our corporate sponsors. And then came back, and then I had a trip to Singapore where we have established for the first time, a significant research center outside of 02139.

INTERVIEWER: Where there any surprises on these trips?

CANIZARES: The trip to Russia was fascinating. There's another case of where I think there's a group of -- an economy and a government that recognizes that they really need to try to understand how places like MIT, and Stanford is the other leading example, have research universities that engage with the marketplace, in a sense, and the commercial world.

So, I found it quite fascinating to see what is effectively in many ways a highly developed country with a very educated population. But it's also a developing country because of the state of their economy. Their economy is really dominated by oil and gas. They're trying to figure out how to move that into the 21st century with more of a knowledge economy. They're looking to MIT for advice and help, and we're thinking about whether that's a good idea or how we could engage effectively.

INTERVIEWER: How well does MIT understand this process of spurring economies? Is there a belief that more can be done, either here or in Russia or anywhere else?

CANIZARES: Well, the answer to the second question first, yes. I think there's a strong feeling that there are specific things that can be done. But to the extent of how well we understand it ourselves -- I think there are people here who thought quite a bit about it. Richard Lester being one, for example, in the industrial performance center. Suzanne Berger, Fiona Harrison and Ed Roberts in the entrepreneurship center. So that's part of our entrepreneurial ecosystem, as we like to call it. I think it would be great. I'd love to have someone do an even more comprehensive study of it -- it's something that we might think about.

But MIT, I think there's also a feeling that it's not going to be easy for other places to just become an MIT, and there are many people who've started -- the India institutes of technology were started, the Europeans have talked about starting a European MIT, and they've created something now which is more of a virtual university, in a sense, that tries to achieve some of that. There's a lot of culture here that goes back a long way, and that's hard to create anywhere.

But I think one could certainly stimulate a lot of things. And there are places that have done that in very specific areas. There are some regions around the United States -- you think of Austin, Texas. Even Akron, Ohio, which may be surprising, but they've focused in a specific area, more so than biotech. So people have tried to find at least some mechanisms to foster some of the things that happen at MIT. We're very lucky here that it happens really across the board.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that kind of focus moved MIT from where it's been in terms of basic research into something that's more applied? Does the balance shift?

CANIZARES: Well, I think there's been a little bit of a shift of balance maybe. But one of the things, and I'm glad you mention that, because one of the things that I feel is very important is that we not lose sight. After all, my field is probably -- we're very firmly in the basic research area. While we talk a lot about the excitement that happens at the interdisciplinary boundaries, I don't think you can have an interdisciplinary boundary if you don't have a discipline to start with.

So, in fact, that discipline has to be very firmly grounded. So, I think that's one of the challenges for us is to make sure that we maintain the balance effectively. That said, I think there's no question that, for a variety of reasons -- some of them intellectual, just the evolution of fields, and some of them externally driven by the economy and the recognition that in a sense it's time--. In World War II, it was recognized that it was time for the science and technology community to stand up and try to help the world.

I think while that's always true, and MIT has done that continuously, I think there is again sort of a sense of a global imperative, in terms of energy and environment, and in terms of human health and the vast population of the world that's still living on $1.00 and $2.00 a day. That spirit is very strong here at MIT, both among the students, and among the faculty.

So if you look at the energy initiative as an example, there are now some 250 faculty, a quarter of our faculty, who are in some ways engaged in the energy initiative. People who 15 years ago if you ask them do you work on energy, they'd say no. And now they're recognizing that some of their skills and their abilities and their interest can be focused on this activity. So it is a bit more of a shift. That's happening in the School of Science, and in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, not just in the School of Engineering. But as I say, at the same time we've got to make sure that the basic research and the foundations of the our disciplines remain strong as well. Otherwise, we're likely to drift off. I don't think that's going to happen. I'm not worried that that's--.

INTERVIEWER: Well, there are certainly interesting discussions and debates going on in the higher ed community more broadly, and within MIT about whether to shift, say, the undergraduate education. If you look at Engineering Systems Division where they say well, maybe they don't need quite as much mechanical engineering or aero and astro and they should have a little bit more education in terms of political science or economics or management. In research it's common, I guess, to organize around problems and to have the interdisciplinary approach. But the question of how to get your discipline in the education of students, and yet to tackle these problems seems to be a harder one to figure out.

CANIZARES: No, I think this is a continual process of readjustment and renewal. I don't think it's a revolution, at least from my point I would say that it's not that we need to throw out all the old ways of doing things and do something new. I think it needs evolution. One of the things that really made MIT sort of stand out was a recognition now over 50 years ago of the need to have an engineering curriculum that was strongly based in the disciplines, the sort of engineering sciences it's called. That really transformed, in some ways, engineering education.

I think there are many people who feel -- and I'm not an engineer, so I'm speaking very much out of school here -- but there are people who feel that engineering has a lot of aspects of it which are not entirely just the technical ones. They're social, economic. And that the systems view, for example, that the Engineering Systems Division has, is an important thing for every engineer to have. I think the school of engineering has already adapted to that in many ways.

Many of our students take courses in the Sloan School, for example. Just several courses in management, recognizing that that's going to be part of their future as well. Just putting a writing requirement in, which we did decades ago, was a recognition that writing equations alone is not going to make an engineer or a scientist successful. That they have to be able to express themselves in language.

So I think all that's part of the same continual adjustment of our curriculum. I spent my undergraduate and graduate years at Harvard and I still have many colleagues and friends there. I'm interacting with people at Harvard almost three times a week on a typical -- for one thing or another. Nonetheless, I see a significant difference in the institutions. When I was at Harvard, I took a course from David Riesman, the great sociologist. He had these categories. He talked about tradition-bound and other-directed and inner-directed -- talking about individuals.

But in terms of institutions, Harvard is a very tradition-bound institution for good reason. It has a long and distinguished tradition. But I used to characterize the difference between us is that when you're at Harvard and you say I'd like to do something new, there would be more of a tendency for people to say well, we've done it this way for 336 years, at least when I was an undergraduate, now it's been more years. Why? Let's examine that one, I'm not sure we should do something new. At MIT you say let's do something new, they say, oh that's great, what is it, let's try it. That means that we're always very willing to renew ourselves and to optimize -- maybe too willing sometimes. But we run experiments. We are experimenters. So running an experiment is absolutely in our blood, and that's a great thing about this institution.

INTERVIEWER: As vice president for research at one of the world's top research universities, do you wake up every morning thinking about MIT's opportunities and responsibilities to solve the world's problems?

CANIZARES: That is very much on, not just my mind, but I would say the mind of our administration. Certainly, Susan Hockfield, I was in a meeting with her yesterday. We were talking about some of these exact same things with a number of faculty. I think MIT in the fabric has a strong sense of a duty and an obligation and a responsibility for really making an impact on the Nation and the world. We talk about the sort of three pillars of creating new knowledge, transmitting knowledge, namely education, and service. And the service is service to the nation and to the world. We do that in a number of different ways. You've mentioned Lincoln Laboratory, which is really an entity designed to provide service by providing the most advanced technology for National security.

So I think this is very much on people's minds. I spend a lot of time, as I say, on national committees doing studies which are not -- or going to meetings and addressing policy issues, which may be of general interest to MIT or might be a general benefit to MIT or maybe not. But would be important for the country and for the world. I think many of our faculty feel that it's sort of ingrained in the DNA of this place.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any kind of metric for trying to measure whether MIT is doing better on this front year by year or not, or does one simply dive in and do one's best?

CANIZARES: I wish there were a metric I could look at. Of course, we are both a little suspicious of, but also keep an eye on all the usual metrics of rankings of universities just because perceptions of that sort of thing are important. Our reputation worldwide is absolutely outstanding. Having done a lot of traveling around the world, and having had a lot of people come through Cambridge and ask for meetings and discussions and trying to get relationships with MIT, our reputation is absolutely outstanding. One of the things I would do, I wouldn't say every morning when I wake up, but I think of regularly is when you're on top of the mountain there's only one direction you might go in, which is down, and we don't want that to happen. So I spend a lot of time thinking about what it is we need to do to maintain our position.

I think a lot of the metrics that we look at we do pretty well at. Number of patents filed -- we do better than any other single university in the country. Usually the lists have University of California at the top, but that's because it's all the campuses wrapped together. Total amount of research volume, our success rate, proposals that go into the federal government or elsewhere, our ability to attract both international and industrial and corporate sponsors, we're doing very well on all those things.

INTERVIEWER: Some of those are inputs and not outputs.

CANIZARES: Yeah, those are inputs and not outputs, but they are inputs that would only happen -- they're voluntary inputs, because they would only happen if the output is valuable and it attracts--. One of the most important things is the track record of the investigators when they're writing a proposal. In terms of actually metrics to measure the output, we tend not to look at those very much. We don't look much at -- I never look at citation indices or number of publications. I just assume that that's going to be good. Of course, we look very hard at every promotion and tenure case. I sit on the committee that reviews those and advises the president in the last step of those. So having the top people is the number one thing. We are in the talent business, fundamentally.

INTERVIEWER: It's interesting that you talk about the recognition worldwide of MIT's capabilities and so forth, and yet, before the financial markets crashed, when the endowments were soaring, there were policymakers in Washington, in Massachusetts and elsewhere who were criticizing wealthy research universities for benefiting from their tax exempt status and not giving enough back. It was interesting that a lot of the discussion focused on why isn't education free -- there's the education part. And there was little or no discussion that I can recall of are they giving back in terms of research and service. Why do you think that was? I know it suggested there's a blind spot despite the recognition.

CANIZARES: I spend a lot of time in Washington, DC, and that's where most of this came from, actually. I think there was not that much of it coming, certainly not from our state. I will say the Governor in our -- there may be a legislator here and there who might be on a high horse, but we've had very good relationships with the state government. But in Congress there were a few people, Senator Grassley is an example of somebody who has been on a campaign. I spent enough time in Washington to really respect the people there. At the same time, they are very political animals. They get on sort of populist, sometimes bandwagons that look attractive to them.

I also think that it's possible to lump all universities together, and yet we know that there's a huge variety in universities, and these days there are for-profit universities that have had practices that have come under some scrutiny. And again, I think there's a danger, just as in the financial reform we've just had, of lumping all banks together or all universities together.

So, it is true, I believe, and many of my colleagues, my counterparts whom I talk to regularly at our sort of peer universities, feel that to some extent the compact between universities and the federal Government that was established largely through the efforts of Vannevar Bush after the second World War that really started the federal supported research in universities. But that compact is -- it's certainly not broken, but it's a little tattered and frayed. We think it needs to be restored. I think that exactly the issue of creating the case, and really re-establishing what role these research universities play in the country and how they do provide service and a return for the tax exempt status.

The other side of it though is that these endowments are examples of where the universities have put -- and their alumni and their friends -- have put huge amount of effort and resources into providing something that in the end helps the country, helps the students. It's not that the money is being used to have -- I don't know, to buy jewels, for the president or fast cars for the provost. It's really going into infrastructure and research activities and trying to hire the best faculty and giving them the start-up funds that they need. And all those things are things that then put them in a position to be able to take a research grant from the National Institutes of Health and find a cure for a terrible disease like cancer. So I think our case needs to be made more carefully.

Frankly, one of the things that MIT does also, more than any other, is to spend time in Washington -- our faculty, our president, myself and others, to try to keep going around and talking to people and sending some of these messages. But more work needs to be done.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that you think the compact needs to be restored. Do you really think that's possible and that that will happen? Or that it's going to be a matter of just thinking it never will be restored and it's time to move on and nail down the other sources and new models of funding?

CANIZARES: No. First of all, I think the compact is still in place. I think it's, as I say, frayed more than broken. And I think it is possible to make some progress. I mean there's an area which is, one arcane area -- excuse me -- a policy that I've certainly worked a lot on over the last 20 years is export controls. Not something that people normally think of, but it's the regulations that normally you think of protecting us from having people export weapons to third world countries, but actually has an effect on research.

We have worked for -- I and a number of people -- have worked literally for decades to try to get the government to recognize some of the issues associated there. We've had some sporadic progress along the way. We just had the Undersecretary of Defense just issue a letter that helps clarify some things along these lines, and the administration is doing a review.

Now that's not only because of universities. Some industries are very concerned about export controls and they've worked on that as well. But there's an example of sort of a piece of the compact. As I say, we're getting into the weeds. A big issue has to do with indirect costs and how those are reimbursed with the passing of just an increasing number of regulations that restrict how we can operate. Reporting requirements without supporting the infrastructure needed to do those.

So it's sort of the detail level to some extent. But it is also at the philosophical level. It's an understanding of the fact that there really is a mutually beneficial relationship here. I think most people in Washington do believe that. I have never--.

INTERVIEWER: Congress, too?

CANIZARES: Yes, and Congress too.

INTERVIEWER: What makes you think that?

CANIZARES: Well, because I talk to a lot of people there, and I know -- I know what the staff feels, I know what many of the members feel. Susan Hockfield goes and visits a great many members of Congress during the course of a year. And mostly, we've had many come to visit and visit us here. We had President Obama here, recognizing, in a sense, the role that MIT plays, in that case, in energy -- sort of new energy green technologies.

So I think there are many people who understand it. That doesn't mean that you're not going to have somebody who's going to be poking at us. And frankly, as much as I hate to say this, having critics around is not a bad thing either. I think we have to maintain, we have to be vigilant ourselves to make sure that we are fulfilling our end of the bargain at all times.

INTERVIEWER: I think you said that MIT at this point derives about 70 percent of its funding from federal agencies?

CANIZARES: That's right.

INTERVIEWER: That's down from a higher number 20, 40 years ago?

CANIZARES: It's gone actually up and down a little bit over the years. But yes, 10 years ago it was more like 80 percent. So it's been slipping down a little bit, and 20 years ago it might have been 75 percent.

INTERVIEWER: In 10 or 20 years, you think it'll be the same or higher or lower?

CANIZARES: Frankly, I don't think anyone can read the newspaper and not recognize the fact that the federal Government is going to be going through some significant austerity period, the whole country is. And I hope that people realize it more and more and figure out a way to do it sensibly. So I actually think that I would not expect that to be going up a lot in the near future. I think there is a recognition in Washington right now, certainly in the administration and in parts of Congress, but not all, that a lot of the federal research funding is, in fact, something that can drive innovation and help the economy in the long run. But it's not going to help it always in the very short run, and that's a dilemma for them when times are tough.

INTERVIEWER: How successful has MIT been in finding other sources to underwrite research and what kinds of issues are raised in turning to these other sources?

CANIZARES: We've actually been quite successful. And by we, I really mean the faculty, because they're the ones who individually write the proposals. Those of us in the administration do everything that we can to make sure they're aware of all the opportunities, to provide sort of convening power to make things happen. We've done that around some of the opportunities coming out, for example, the Department of Energy recently have been very successful with the federal funding. And when the energy initiative was started, the plan was to look first to industry for funding. So that amount of activity, that was very successful. We raised $250 million for the first five years of the energy initiative from industry before even starting some of these Department of Energy opportunities.

There's a great deal of interest in international circles for partnership with MIT. And so the Singapore-MIT alliance first, and now SMART, which is Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology are examples, and those are significant sort of sources of funding for us, as well as new opportunities of working in a new place. We have other international activities that we're exploring.

So I think there are other opportunities we have to maintain. The federal Government will still be the most important, and the sort of foundation of our research activities, particularly in the basic sciences, because a lot of these other areas are more interested in a little bit more of the applied research.

The issues are simply that research, with corporate sponsors and foundation research, foundation funding, which is also another area that's grown, and international, all have their own challenges. We have a pretty standard way of dealing with the federal government from a contracting, intellectual property, et cetera, point of view. Every private sponsor is a one-off negotiation, and those are both time-consuming and sometimes raise issues that are difficult to work through, particularly, as I say, in the areas of intellectual property. There's also the issue of conflict of interest, because many of our faculty also consult for companies; one has to be very careful to make sure that we keep MIT pure and isolated in a sense from both the perception and the reality of conflict of interest.

So I spend a significant amount of my time, I think I have two meetings a day on this topic alone.

INTERVIEWER: In 2006 when you became vice president for research, you said one of your goals was to foster an outstanding research environment for MIT's Faculty, students, and staff. How do you define such an environment, and what parts of it do you think work well at this stage and what would you like to change?

CANIZARES: Well, the environment has a lot of different parts of it. Some of it really is, again, the nuts and bolts of research administration, because for our faculty, a lot of -- what we try to do is make it as easy as possible for the faculty to spend as much time on research and education as they can, and less on administration and reporting and filling out progress reports. Unfortunately, a lot of our sponsors and particularly the federal Government has only increased the amount of activity required. So what we try to do is put in place tools and support mechanisms that allow them to do that.

I think we still have progress to be made there. We're working on it a lot. The task force identified recently -- the task force on-- Institute-wide task force that was really driven by our budget concerns, but was recognized as an opportunity to also learn how to do things better. I looked at ways that we could operate more efficiently, and we're going to try to implement those.

Another area, though, is things like research infrastructure. So, in fact, I've spent a lot of time in the last year and a half on a major effort to try to establish a high performance computing center in western Massachusetts where energy costs are a lot lower than they are here in Cambridge, that would provide tools for all those across MIT who need high performance computing to enable them to do their research. So that's another kind of example, and we're working a lot with the Koch Institute on establishing centralized facilities in the life sciences.

So that is another example of the research environment. Of course, then there's just the issue of making sure that our research community, the faculty, and then groups like the postdocs, for whom my office has general responsibility from an Institute-wide perspective have them entering the training that they need and that they deserve.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned task force recommendations. Were there any in particular that came out that people said, gee, this really will make it a better place?

CANIZARES: I think it was more incremental than having discovered the secret sauce. As I say, I think I've already mentioned they're really mainly issues of greater efficiency and consolidation and trying to--. We now have a whole variety of systems that were sort of home-grown and all the labs and centers were just doing their accounting and proposal preparation. We're trying to get that streamlined so not only will that make it easier for them to submit proposals through our office of sponsored programs, but it will also make it easier for them to collaborate with each other because now they can write a joint proposal and they both have the same software. So little things like that can make actually a significant difference. I wouldn't say that's in the nature of something that is not very attractive or sexy, but it's essential.

INTERVIEWER: And it takes an effort to get there, I guess, too. You may say when you're there, there are efficiencies that'll make your life easier, but first you have to find them out.

CANIZARES: Getting from here to there is not easy. Anybody who's bought a new computer knows that.

INTERVIEWER: You also said when you took this job that you hope to enable major research initiatives that cut across the Institute. Have you been able to do that? MIT's always done some of that.

CANIZARES: Has always done some of that, but we're doing that more than ever. And again, it would be absolutely wrong for me to take more than an iota of credit for this because it's happening. So all I'm trying to do is do what I can to encourage it and foster it. There are two major initiatives that now report to my office that didn't on the day that I took office. Again, one of them being the Energy Initiative, and the other being the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Those are two outstanding examples, and our two largest activities across disciplinary boundaries.

So I'll start with the second first. The Koch Institute took our outstanding center for cancer research, with what is it, six Nobel Prizes, and is combining it with, thanks to generosity of David Koch, with a group of outstanding engineers from a whole variety of different departments and putting them in the same center. They're already working together, but when the new building opens at the end of this calendar year, it will be absolutely outstanding. And that convergence of life science with engineering is one of the very exciting things that's happening on campus. And that we're trying to enable, from the central administration, just by helping in any way we can.

The Energy Initiative, while we've had interdisciplinary activities in the past, there's nothing as interdisciplinary as the Energy Initiative. It covers all five schools, and really all five schools. It's not just a tagline, it's the reality. It's brought together people from across the Institute, and students and faculty and staff, not just a selected group of faculty, in ways that are unprecedented. I've been very pleased and proud to be able to make small contributions to help as we can from the center to foster the development of the Energy Initiative.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned the postdocs end up on your plate. Are there parts of your experience as a postdoc that help you think of things you want to do on that front? How do you encourage mentorships? Isn't that something that's hard to make happen -- the chemistry between two people?

CANIZARES: It is hard. First of all, I came to MIT as a postdoc, and they were some of the most exciting years that I spent here. So I think it's a great period for a young scholar. I think the postdocs still are somewhat the neglected population at MIT. The numbers have grown very considerably. And now, a very significant fraction of our postdocs are international students, or international visitors, which gives them additional sort of social adjustment that's needed. I think we need to do more. So that's an area, since you've asked where I think more attention is needed, I think we really need to do more there.

INTERVIEWER: Let's back up and talk about how you came to MIT and your life until then. Where were you born? Where did you grow up?

CANIZARES: I was born in Tucson, Arizona, but that was an accident of where my family happened to be at the time. My father was stationed there during the very end of the second World War. So I really grew up in New York or in the near suburbs of New York, in Yonkers, and my father worked in Manhattan. So I consider myself at least an honorary Manhattanite. I spent a lot of time there.

INTERVIEWER: What did your parents do?

CANIZARES: My father was a physician, a dermatologist, a clinician, but always very interested in research. He ended up writing a number of books, including a major textbook on clinical tropical dermatology. So I always think of him spending pretty much every weekend with a legal yellow pad, writing, and wrote many articles. So he set a good example, in a way, for scholarship, even though he was also very much a clinician and had an active practice in Manhattan, and visiting physician at several hospitals in New York.

INTERVIEWER: And your mother?

CANIZARES: My mother was an artist of -- she was a commercial artist part of her life, but that was I think just to help to support the family. She was a fine artist and an art teacher. Informal, she had art classes that she taught out of our basement for decades. And worked in a variety of media, but watercolors and oils were her sort of mainstays. She got into graphics later in her life. So that was actually a nice combination of science and art. She also helped my father a lot. He had a lot of activities involved in the writing of his papers, but also in organizing some societies. He created a society for tropical dermatology, he focused on third world countries. He was born in Cuba, so we always had a lot of connections and interest in Latin America, which then also spread to southeast Asia. He had connections in Thailand, spent some time there for the World Health Organization.