Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

NAS president is next in Chancellor’s speaker series

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – When Ralph Cicerone, a renowned climate scientist and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, first set foot on the UI campus in the mid-1960s, focus wasn’t his strong point.

It was obvious the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, who had been accepted into the electrical engineering doctoral program and was the first in his family to go to college, wasn’t lacking in academic ability.

He just hadn’t yet discovered how to draw from all that knowledge to create something new and special with it.

“As an undergraduate, all I really cared about was sports,” said Cicerone, who in his time at MIT was captain of the baseball team. “And somehow I managed to fit my education around it. I didn’t have any relatives who had gone to college and I had little idea what I was doing.”

On the Urbana campus, Cicerone found that needed balance and direction.

“Illinois was so big and there were so many different students and disciplines – I met so many other students it was just amazing,” he said.

He continued taking advantage of the social scene, but in ways that were ancillary to his studies, not fighting for their attention. His love of baseball, for example, became restricted to “raucous” intramural games.

“I eventually figured out I had to decide – you can’t be the best at everything; you have to choose,” he said. “I learned how to manage my time and sort out what I wanted to do.”

Cicerone had come to Illinois expecting to earn his master’s degree, which at the time he saw as insurance for future employment in the private sector. Instead, he chose a path of research and stayed for his doctorate, specializing in plasma physics and the earth’s ionospere. “The deeper I went into things, the more I was understanding them and enjoying the discovery,” he said.

Cicerone’s tenure as a student at Illinois came during a time of change in the focus of the electrical engineering field, which naturally was converging with the development of the nascent computer field.

“It was a very exciting time to be there,” he said. “It was very competitive and the whole environment was outstanding. This university is a national asset and I’m looking forward to seeing the campus again.”

Cicerone has conducted groundbreaking climate research, collected a long list of prestigious prizes, and in 2001 was given an assignment from President George H.W. Bush to lead the National Academy of Sciences in its preparation of a report on the effects of climate change.

A few things have changed in the decade since that eye-opening report: There is a new report on the effects of climate change; the warnings of the threats posed by climate change are more dire; and the latest report was at the behest of the business community.

“I think it (climate change) is already happening,” he said, noting it’s becoming obvious to even the previously unconvinced that human influence is most certainly a factor in climate change. “What we’re measuring is showing the changes more clearly than ever.”

Cicerone said he still conducts his own research as an emeritus professor at the University of California at Irvine, though most of his time is devoted to NAS and the National Research Council, which he also chairs.

As for his Oct. 29 talk, Cicerone said he welcomes the opportunity to discuss the role of research universities in the future.

“Over the years we’ve led the world in the capacity of our research universities,” he said. “We have to be asking, ‘What should we be doing to build it up even stronger?’ “

The good news, he said, is that strong foundations are already in place. The world already looks to America for scientific leadership, and the peer-review system in the states is second to none, he said, which creates unmatched “branding” for U.S. research.

But with federal and state funding in decline, the real question is how future research will be supported at the same levels.

One way is to show the economic advantages of such research by applying it to actionable real-world problems, such as agriculture, he said. And while corporate support is more important than ever, he said the discussion must include ways to ensure true academic discovery isn’t being sacrificed.

“We’ve got some work to do, but we must remember that the rest of the world is trying to imitate our system all of the time,” he said.

Cicerone said another important factor is finding ways to give deserving students more affordable access.

The college cost problem, he said, is more a reflection of dwindling tax support than any actual increase in the costs of attending. “The costs have been shifted because the states used to pay a big fraction of that total cost,” he said.

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