Faculty Voices
What UCLA Researchers and Academic Leadership Said — in Their Own Words
In 2023, the RDWG steering committee conducted 33 meetings with UCLA academic leadership — deans, associate deans for research, chairs, and IT directors from nearly every school — plus four public faculty forums and sessions with the Academic Senate. Notes from every session were independently coded by four reviewers.
The quotes below are drawn directly from those sessions. They are organized by the problem they describe.
Source: RDWG Roadmap Update and Moving Forward, August 7, 2023
Research Leaving UCLA
“We’re thinking about the follow up to this grant, and we’re saying let’s do the next one at Notre Dame.”
— Faculty executive committee chair
“We’ve got faculty coming from other institutions and they say, ‘Hey, I’m coming from X and it was so easy there.’ It feels like they’ve slid backwards in terms of their storage needs.”
— Associate dean for research
Faculty are actively considering routing grants through collaborating institutions and relying on services at UC Davis Health Cloud Innovation Center, Wharton Research Data Services, San Diego Supercomputing Center, and the University of Chicago’s OCHRE environment. Recruitment and retention were raised repeatedly across schools. A lack of research infrastructure was cited as the reason a star recruitment failed.
Grants and Funding at Risk
“We’re putting out fires every day. There’s a lot of money being lost as well. Delays. NIH gets upset. Other institutions pull back funding. [It] becomes very real both for the PI and the School.”
— Principal investigator
“NIH must know that we don’t have the capacity to do this. We’ve been in conversations with our program officers. They ask us what campus resources we have, [and] we tell them we’re responsible to do it for the grant. … Our program officers are surprised that we don’t have any support in this.”
— Faculty member
One PI described shifting staff from research to data management solely to meet funder requirements for publicly available datasets. Another unit reported struggling to provide adequate grant support staff for multi-institutional proposals.
Storage — No Clear Solution
“Storage is a huge issue. Chairs would email me about storage — backup storage, collaboration space. … In the division they offer a generous baseline; establishing that baseline is low-hanging fruit. Everyone needs storage space: Box, Google Drive, Synology, research data backup, co-storage, allocations [with] permissions.”
— Associate dean for research
“They’re putting [data] all over the place. The lack of a clear set of choices to go to [means] that everyone is finding their own way, so keeping this secure is impossible.”
— Associate dean for research
“At this stage, they don’t care where [their data] goes. They need to go to a place that’s OK, they can describe that in the proposal, and they can easily get it there. Convenience and simplicity.”
— Faculty member on secure storage
Secure Data — A Gap with Real Consequences
“We can’t currently provide HIPAA-compliant storage. We’re hoping for help for folks with a foot in the med center that work with human subjects. If we can’t help them, they’ll roll their own and it’s not secure and not scalable.”
— IT director
“[One of my researchers] needed a FISMA solution and had to go to Irvine or Riverside for that. SDSC may have been the solution. We don’t have a place that meets all levels of security.”
— Faculty member
“They’re hungry for a central place that will check all the boxes, that’s quick and easy. Something that is easy.”
— Faculty member on P3/P4 compliant storage
Collaboration Across Campus and Institutions
“[As a result,] I can’t access and use the PI Portal. I can’t even use Box on South Campus. So when we talk about inter-institutional collaboration, it’s as if we’re two different institutions.”
— Lead PI on a large NIH grant
“Research groups come to us and they’re looking for storage locations and collaboration, specifically collaborations [involving] data.”
— Faculty member
“[We need] ways to share large files. [Something] safe yet accessible to people outside UCLA. [Our files are] too large to share and people are not able to access our Box [folders].”
— Faculty member
Duplicative Effort and Wasted Resources
“I am always stunned at the 17 places where the same things are happening and encourage you to make sure that those overlaps are foregrounded and addressed.”
— Dean
“If we don’t have the infrastructure in place, that will put a lot of obstacles and barriers to allowing [our] work to take place. It’s preventing people from engaging with the research. People have to reinvent the wheel because there isn’t infrastructure in place.”
— Faculty member
“When we recruit in data sciences, it’s costing us a lot of money in start-up costs. It’s breaking the bank.”
— Faculty member
Security, Software, and Workarounds
“The short-term solution is that people buy the software with their own money or get free versions online, which is a huge security risk. The policy as it is being implemented is a detriment to researchers and the campus. It makes things worse rather than better. Bad for security and researchers.”
— Faculty member on campus software licensing
“The whole purchasing and invoicing [situation] is a big issue. A lot of the large vendors aren’t filling our orders because we’re not paying our bills on time.”
— Faculty member
Data Services — Expertise That Doesn’t Exist
“Our investigators will need more statistical management of these datasets. That’s going to be frustrating for investigators down the line.”
— Faculty member
“I’m thinking about data security. When this [roadmap] is all laid out, [we’ll need] a dedicated security team and dedicated admin team that understands the data that’s flowing in and out, to work with this new service to support it. That would make researchers believe their data are safe here.”
— Faculty member
The Bureaucracy Is Blocking Research
“It feels like there are policies in place, but there’s an inflexibility to take something case-by-case and it requires eight people to find a solution. It should be easier than that.”
— Faculty member
“NIH awards are made to UCLA and not UC Health, but UC Health requires nonsensical oversight that, more often than not, is not applicable to non-human data collection or non-patient behavioral science data.”
— Faculty member
“Any time we can make it less frustrating, smoother — any time the faculty do well, the whole university does well.”
— Faculty member
What the Campus Wants
“We’re pretty decentralized and everyone is off doing their own thing. If you can get us thinking about one campus… make it more cohesive so everyone understands we’re in a shared environment.”
— Faculty member
“Most [challenging] is trying to find resources on campus. Provide a document on resources on campus. UCSF updated an annual list of resources that one could use to cut and paste into proposals. Having one source for campus with that information would be really great.”
— Faculty member
“Explaining to everybody what resources are out there and how to access them is critical.”
— Faculty member
These quotes were collected during the RDWG’s 2023 campus engagement campaign — 33 meetings with deans, associate deans for research, chairs, IT directors, and faculty from nearly every UCLA school, plus four public faculty forums. Notes were independently coded by four reviewers. The full report is available on the Resources page.