New website shares data

WILMINGTON — Members of the Board of Governors got a sneak peak at a website that will function like a Facebook for researchers.

The website, dubbed REACH-NC, is still in beta and only includes data from two UNC schools. It’ll show off connections between researchers, their work, grants they’ve earned and people they’ve worked with.

“We’re spending a lot of time trying to make our research useful to the state,” said Steven Leath, the UNC-systems’ vice president for research.

“We want to be able to tell the story of what we’re doing and what we’re capable of.”

REACH-NC takes existing data and makes it easier to see the relationships between the system’s 15,000 faculty members, 1,000 baccalaureate programs and $1.4 billion in annual research funding.

Look up “asthma” and it’ll show every faculty member with an expertise on the disease, the research they’ve produced, the classes they’ve taught on the subject and the grants they’ve received.

Search among UNC’s chemistry department, and the most prolific researchers show up along with who they work with and the patents they hold. A department head could look for junior faculty that would benefit from mentorships with more experienced faculty.

The site should make it easier to see potential candidates for grants.

Because it can drill down into such specifics, others could use it to poach faculty from within the UNC system, a concern raised by several board members.

But all the information on the site is already public, Leath said. Someone intent on poaching from UNC would already know the major players and have access to the information elsewhere.

Research Director Courtney Thorton said her office frequently gets calls asking who in the system is doing research on a particular topic, and the website will make it easier to answer that question.

Right now the site draws data from UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State University.

All UNC-system schools will be included by summer 2011, and partnerships with Wake Forest and Duke universities are being explored. RTI International, a nonprofit research organization based at the Research Triangle Park, has also expressed interest in being involved.

Few other schools have such a way to organize their data. There are similar sites in Michigan and Georgia, but they don’t include information outside the biomedical fields and don’t include data from as many sources as UNC’s site will.

The site should go live either late this year or early next year. Anyone will have access to it, although the system is still trying to work out the extent to which some information will be displayed.

“We want to get it right and then we’ll promote it,” UNC President Erskine Bowles said.

Contact the State & National Editor at stntdesk@unc.edu.