With joy and fascination, chemist Greg Holland examined a delicate, squiggly spider in his lab at San Diego State University and thought of possibilities.
The golden orb weaver under his microscope produces incredibly strong silk. He believes the material might be better synthesized to create everything from artificial tendons for humans to tougher suspension bridges.
“Much of the faculty, including me, aren’t just thinking about basic research like this,” said Holland, who has been at SDSU nine years. “We are also thinking about how to develop these ideas in the lab, patent them, and maybe start a company.”
SDSU is in the midst of the biggest research boom in school history, an entrepreneurial-driven endeavor that’s expected to grow further as it expands from its home on Montezuma Mesa to branch campuses in Mission Valley, Brawley and Calexico.
The university obtained a record $192.2 million for research over the past year — $85 million more than it brought in a decade ago. The school says it might hit $300 million somewhere around 2030, making SDSU a big-time player in San Diego County, one of the largest science meccas in the country.
The National Institutes of Health, NASA and Department of Defense are among the agencies pouring money into SDSU, sometimes for truly futuristic projects. One researcher is helping develop autonomous flying taxis that might someday shuttle engers between San Diego and Los Angeles.
About 10 years ago, SDSU began to more actively recruit faculty who’ve shown skill not only in teaching, but research, in areas as different as biology and the humanities.
The shift partly arose from a deepening belief that research informs teaching in many ways and broadly improves the human condition.
SDSU also is motivated by a deep desire to be designated as a Research 1 institution, an elite classification that’s awarded through a highly competitive process managed by the American Council on Education. Fewer than 150 universities nationwide have R1 status. The list includes UC San Diego, Stanford and Harvard.
SDSU, which just began the fall semester with a record 37,082 students, could the club before the end of the decade.
Analysts say that being designated R1 helps universities draw top students, private donations and research money.
“If you look at the quality of research, the quality of resumes, the research grants that have been developed here, (you’ll see) that our faculty could be at any Research 1 institution,” said economist Adela de la Torre, who just finished her fifth year as SDSU’s president.
“They’ve engaged in this work at multiple levels.”
The current boom is being propelled by many things, including the brisk development of the new Mission Valley campus, which already boasts a sports stadium and, when completed, will include a science innovation park similar to one at UC Irvine — a hotel, retail, housing, community parks and open space.
Snapdragon Stadium opened last August, providing a new home for SDSU’s football team. It’s also becoming a major concert venue. And it will be the home of a new Major League Soccer team starting in 2025.
The stadium is focusing a lot of attention on a site where life science buildings will begin rising early next year, forming the core of an innovation park. SDSU has partnered with Techstars, a global investment firm that will help the school cultivate startup companies at the park and in other parts of the university.
SDSU also has announced partnerships with San Diego-based Quidel, which develops rapid diagnostic tests, and San Diego’s Naval Health Research Center which, like the university’s School of Public Health, is a leader in infectious disease research.
“Our mission is to optimize the health and wellness of our military and their families,” said Dr. Ken Earhart, NHRC’s chief science director. “We’ve partnered with SDSU for 30 years and are looking forward to engaging with them in the new innovation hub.”
It’s unclear exactly how fast Mission Valley will grow. But “our expectation is that there will be demand for co-locating with a university,” said Hala Madanat, SDSU’s vice president of research and innovation.
The innovation park will enable SDSU to move some of its science programs to Mission Valley, freeing up a bit of space on main campus, where an old life science center will be phased out and replaced with a new facility expected to cost upwards of $100 million.
SDSU also is preparing to build a STEM research and education center in Brawley starting in January. The project was made possible with $80 million in funding from the state, which wants the university to train students, especially in Imperial County, to extract lithium from the ground near the Salton Sea so it can be used to produce batteries for electric vehicles.
In addition, the university is looking to collaborate with geothermal companies on research aimed at making such mining faster and more efficient. They’re working in a region that has so much lithium it’s come to be known as Lithium Valley.
Model for success
SDSU is enjoying the benefits of a culture set in place by the late Thomas Day, a Cold War-era physicist who became the school’s president in 1978.
He promoted the teacher-scholar model, which pushed faculty to conduct research and scholarship rather than just focusing on their classrooms.
Not everyone was on board with it. Teaching was, and still is, the primary mission of California State University campuses. They are meant to be distinct from the University of California system, whose first priority is research. Many SDSU faculty wanted to stick with that arrangement.
But during his 18-year tenure, Day increased the research budget from less than $11 million to about $67 million. He also made SDSU the first CSU school to offer t doctoral programs with other universities, a move that promoted research.
The research program grew modestly following his departure. But it began to take flight a decade ago when the university launched a campaign to hire hundreds of tenure-track faculty, with an emphasis on the teacher-scholar model. De la Torre made the effort an even bigger priority.
“She’s a scholar; the DNA is in her system,” said former CSU trustee Adam Day of San Diego, who is also one of Thomas Day’s children.
De le Torre also is pressing lawmakers to allow the CSU to award professional or applied doctoral degrees that don’t duplicate those offered by the University of California system. Such a change would further stoke research at schools like SDSU.
The boom is largely unknown to the general public, partly because the school is overshadowed by UC San Diego, which last year brought in more than $1.7 billion for research, making it one of the 10 largest research schools in the country.
That dominance hasn’t prevented SDSU from recruiting notable faculty, which in recent years have included air quality expert Miguel Zavala and geologist Matt Weingarten, who helped discover that the drying of the Salton Sea could delay the onset of a huge earthquake on the San Andreas fault.
“When I interviewed here, SDSU sold me on growth, saying that the campus was on the cusp of a huge upward trajectory,” said Holland, the spider scientist.
“I wanted to be part of that. So do others. We are having zero problems attracting young talent.”
