Pillar II – Research Excellence

• Attain a lasting reputation for deep faculty expertise, high quality education and research outputs.
• Align the research enterprise with society’s needs, and the economy across the region, state, nation and world – including research commercialization, workforce training, and other economic and cultural development that advances all Arkansans.
• Achieve a sustainable, shared research enterprise that adopts and develops best practices in: research administration; growing research facility size and support; faculty recruitment, retention, and success; graduate education; and undergraduate participation in the research enterprise.

Research Excellence Objectives:

• Increase research conducted, particularly in signature and federal priority areas
  • 150 Forward Reaching Higher Goal:
    Grow the amount of research the university conducts annually to $500 million, more than doubling the university’s current record of $221.5 million in research conducted
• Increase scholarly productivity percentile, an algorithim that combines citations, books, chapters, patents, and trials among other measures relative to the size of the faculty
• Regularly attain highly prestigious faculty awards
• Increase patent production-to-expenditure ratio and technology transfer
• Improve retention of faculty
• Increase the number of graduate and doctoral students

We are among the top research universities in the nation. Our research success is supported by our unprecedented investments in our research enterprise including three new leading-edge applied research facilities:

• Institute for Integrative and Innovative Research (I³R) (Opened 2025)
• Multi-User Silicon Carbide Research and Fabrication Facility (MUSiC) (Opening 2025)
• Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation (Opening 2025)