Inside Northwestern’s Collaborative Research Ecosystem with Eric Perreault, PhD

[00:00:00] Erin Spain, MS: Welcome to Science in Translation, a podcast from NUCATS, Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. I'm your host, Erin Spain. This season on science in translation, we are exploring how Northwestern University's interdisciplinary culture drives discovery and impact, harnessing diverse expertise to address society's most challenging problems. To kick things off, we are welcoming to the show Eric Perreault, vice President for research at Northwestern University. He is a scientist, a professor of biomedical engineering and physical medicine and rehabilitation, a senior administrator who oversees Northwestern's $1 billion research portfolio. He has joint appointments in the McCormick School of Engineering, Feinberg School of Medicine, and the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab. Today we will be discussing the power of collaboration and how Northwestern's deeply interdisciplinary culture across multiple schools and units drives research and real world impact. Welcome to the show, Eric.

[00:01:11] Eric Perreault: Thank you, Erin. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:14] Erin Spain, MS: Let's kick things off by just describe Northwestern's research enterprise today and the institutional priorities when it comes to advancing this kind of leading edge research.

[00:01:24] Eric Perreault: We are, as you mentioned, a $1 billion research organization and I think the best way to describe Northwestern is that we are very broad and very deep. You know, we're a university where we have experts across a range of different disciplines, and those experts like to collaborate together and do their best work when they do collaborate together. The priorities for the university are set by the faculty themselves and by the deans who run the schools. And so we have terrific strengths in engineering and medicine and social sciences and the humanities. Again, speaking to the breadth of excellence across our entire campus.

[00:01:56] Erin Spain, MS: You mentioned that these different faculty and institution schools, they like working together. And in fact that interdisciplinary research has been part of Northwestern's DNA for decades. Tell me about that and why does this approach matter so much now, maybe more than ever before.

[00:02:13] Eric Perreault: I think it matters because, you know, we're in a time when science is often questioned, although the value of science is often questioned, yet people often really understand the value when we think about outcomes such as some of the great medicines that are, helping cure diseases or improve quality of life. When we think of the technology that's impacting all of our lives our artificial intelligence to the iPhone and so on and so forth. One of the challenges I think we have as scientists is to connect the really important fundamental research that's done on our campuses and campuses across the country, to those breakthroughs that people can see in their everyday lives. The impact, if you will. So what's the impact that a particular discovery is having on sciences? 'cause often there's a long timeline. So if we take for example GLP one drugs, which I think most people know about these days, they're recently having a huge impact on society and healthcare. Not only weight loss, but cardiovascular disease and again, many other areas, but those breakthroughs are really rooted in discoveries that started back in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. Things that people really didn't know about. Work on fish on Gila monsters and other things. Really fundamental basic science that over years we realized the value and the applications of those fundamental studies. So connecting the dots there from basic to impact is really important and something we've been working on a lot at Northwestern.

[00:03:28] Erin Spain, MS: It was actually Northwestern's interdisciplinary reputation that drew you here many years ago. Tell me about your research and how the interdisciplinary Northwestern University ecosystem has helped you further your research?

[00:03:43] Eric Perreault: My lab is based at the Shirley Ran Ability Lab. We really focus at the intersection of neuroscience and movement controller biomechanics. So we're very interested in how the brain controls movement and then what goes awry following injuries such as a stroke or spinal cord injury. So much of our work is fundamental and mechanistic, but we also take advantage of Northwestern's ecosystem to partner with others. For example, some of the work we've done understands the mechanical properties of limbs and how those change, for example, as you walk from inside to outside in the middle of the winter, and you might step on ice and have to adapt the mechanics of your limbs so that you don't slip. We've been working with some partners over the years who develop artificial legs prostheses essentially, and how can we recreate those mechanics and the interface to the body in an artificial system to mimic what we have in an intact unimpaired human? So that's one of many examples we do. and I was attracted here because of the fantastic partnership between, at the time the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University. One of the people who hired me is Zev. Reimer had this vision back in the eighties of really pulling together engineers and clinicians for the benefit of patients, and he built this research powerhouse, which is the reason why the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, and now the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab has been the number one rehab hospital ever since rankings came out. When I got here, I realized not only are we a powerhouse and rehabilitation, but this idea of bringing together people with divergent ideas to tackle a single challenging problem that's really too big for any laboratory permeates Northwestern. Rehabilitation research and biomedical engineering in general started in Northwestern or in the sixties or so. We have work way back in the early sixties, late fifties in material science. Another real strength at Northwestern. We have work in the Institute for Policy Research. Again, it's not just the STEM disciplines that also started about 50 years ago. In each of these and many other areas, we have faculty with very different perspectives who are working together, and that is really emblematic of the Northwestern way of doing things.

[00:05:40] Erin Spain, MS: and sometimes these relationships, I mean, they just happen because you're at the same institution. You're going to different lectures, hearing about what people are working on, but there are some intentional things that your office does to support this type of work and collaboration. Can you talk about that too?

[00:05:55] Eric Perreault: A lot of times these collaborations start with two faculty or groups of faculty working together. But we do as an institution really try to create an ecosystem or environment that encourages this sort of collaboration. So there are a lot of things we do. One is out of the office for research. We have 22 university research institutes and centers that refer to them as uix. These are typically across school initiatives that bring, again, bring together faculty with a diverse set of experiences and knowledge basis to tackle particular problems. Some of these, for example, the International Institute for Nanotechnology is world leading. Institution that brings together chemists, engineers, clinicians, and a variety of other folks to tackle problems from medicine to material science, to sustainability. We also have an Institute for policy research that I mentioned. We have institutions for the chemistry of life processes and so on and so forth.

[00:06:47] Erin Spain, MS: Share with me your favorite partnerships happening right now at Northwestern, where different disciplines are coming together to tackle something important.

[00:06:57] Eric Perreault: Let me tell you a little bit about an emerging area that we're working in right now. So this idea of longevity research or health span research, not only living longer, but how do we live better for longer. Right? The prevailing idea right now is not that we can necessarily extend lifespan longer right now, but we could certainly extend the health span. And there's some really wonderful work happening in our human longevity laboratory led by Doug Vaughn downtown in the Feinberg School of Medicine outta the Muslim Center for Aging and cognition few other places on campus. And these different groups have been coming together with folks not only on campus, but also working together with companies that are very excited about research in this space to think about how we can advance human health. It's a partnership with our campus, with these companies, with the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab with Northwestern Medicine and we've been talking about contributions in the STEM areas, but Northwestern has research again in the humanities and the social science, and as just one of many examples, we can think about some terrific work coming out of our Institute for Policy research led by Andy Papa Christos. Working on gun violence in particular , Andy and his team have been working very closely with community groups across the city of Chicago with the City of Chicago Police Force trying to identify how we can reduce gun violence. They're using tools, fundamental tools from network science to identify where in the community you should target your efforts to have the biggest impact. Chicago has been in the news a lot. Particular violence in Chicago has been in the news a lot in the last year or so, and the big story is how gun violence has been reduced by about 40% over the last year. A lot of that is due to the kind of work that folks like the Institute for Policy Research and others across the community are doing together. It's just another one of the great examples of the impact that some of the fundamental work in our campus is having in society.

[00:08:48] Erin Spain, MS: Why is it important to forge those relationships with outside companies or government agencies and even other universities around the world? Why is that so important to advancing the research goals?

[00:08:59] Eric Perreault: I think it gets back to your earlier question about impact, right? So we are a research institution here. We generate knowledge and we disseminate that knowledge. But in order to have an impact, we need to make sure it extends beyond the boundaries of our campus. And so those partnerships that we develop, either with other institutions, with companies, with governments are really critical in order to get the knowledge that we create outside of Northwestern.

[00:09:24] Erin Spain, MS: So this interdisciplinary approach, this isn't for faculty, how do Northwestern students and trainees benefit from this specific type of collaboration?

[00:09:34] Eric Perreault: First of all, being in the environment is just really exhilarating. When you come to campus and you realize that you're not going to a laboratory, but you're going to this community of scholars and you can participate in that whole community is wonderful. One way that we see that is we have an addition to being able to come to Northwestern and get a degree, whether that's an undergraduate degree or graduate degree or training. As a postdoctoral fellow, you rarely enter a single laboratory. Instead, you often have an opportunity to partner across laboratories. And this is reflected in the many different training programs we have. Northwestern has over 50 training programs that are funded by external sources. Most of the time these are interdisciplinary. Often trainees who come into these programs have multiple mentors, and so this idea of collaboration and convergence of thought is really very critical to everything we do, and almost all of our trainees who come to campus have a chance to experience that and then take that with them when they leave.

[00:10:25] Erin Spain, MS: Northwestern University itself has made a significant investment in research . Can you talk about that and the tools and the spaces that are available to researchers now, this is all very intentional to be able to do this leading edge work.

[00:10:39] Eric Perreault: You know, we often talk about the funds that we get from the federal government to support our research and those are substantial and very important. We have about a billion dollar portfolio. About three quarters of that comes from the federal government, but most people don't realize the amount of money that the university puts in. So for every dollar we get from the federal government, Northwestern puts in about an additional 40 cents. Those are things that support, renovation of new laboratories, startup packages for faculty, our core facilities, which you mentioned, which are very intentional. So we have about 50 different facilities on campus, which do two things. They're a very efficient use of funds, so we often have microscopes or other characterization tools that are really too expensive and too big for an individual laboratory. So we wanna make sure if we bring something like that to campus, that it doesn't sit in my laboratory, but it's accessible to all of our faculty. So we run those through what we call our core facilities. We've put up new buildings downtown. We have the Simpson Query Biomedical Research Building, which is again, an intentional investment that allowed us to grow our faculty and increase the quality of our science. Then we also have our affiliate hospitals again where my own laboratory is the Shirley R Ability Lab. And through the very generous gift of some of our donors, we've created just a world class hospital and research facility that benefits obviously, first and foremost the patients there, but also the researchers at that affiliate hospital and the Northwestern researchers who get to participate in that great environment.

[00:11:59] Erin Spain, MS: This really is a community effort. You have the university, you have donors, you have federal funding, state funding, as well as you know, the faculty, students and the communities where Northwestern University resides, tell me how all of these different players come together to help Northwestern accomplish its research goals.

[00:12:17] Eric Perreault: Yeah, it really is a great community that we're part of here. comes about through the wonderful leadership that we've had over the years at Northwestern University. We've had a series of great presidents and provosts who have been very forward thinking in terms of building our research enterprise. They have developed great partnerships with our donors and our trustees at the university who have been. Incredibly generous, and you can see their names on some of the wonderful buildings around campus. We have very good partnerships with the state. So for example, some of our innovation enterprises have been supported by funds from the state that Northwestern has matched, or our donors have matched. We don't have one source of funding for our work here. It's really a community and a partnership.

[00:12:56] Erin Spain, MS: Here at NUCATS and across the broader research community, there's been this shift in focus from translational research to translational science. So translational research focuses more on moving discoveries from the lab to the clinic, while translational science studies how to make that process faster, more efficient, more equitable. From your perspective, why is this distinction important? And how do you see translational science helping to accelerate discovery and impact at Northwestern?

[00:13:23] Eric Perreault: Oh yeah, it's so important. The implementation science group downtown is just wonderful and they've had a really big impact. ' cause we can see so many examples across history where we've developed fantastic technologies, but those technologies aren't adopted. Um. Vaccines are one, one example of that, that's in all of our recent memories. And so trying to identify how we can take our greatest discoveries and actually put them into practice is really important, whether that be in the clinic, whether we're thinking about energy and sustainability initiatives or whether we're thinking about reducing gun violence. And so across our campus we have a strong effort in order to connect some of our basic scientists. With implementation scientists or translational scientists as you described it, in order to further the impact of their work. Again, it really comes back to this idea of impact, which is so hard to define. you know it when you see it. But it's when we can really take the knowledge that we are generating and using it for the benefit of society.

[00:14:18] Erin Spain, MS: Where would you like to see the Northwestern University Research Enterprise? What can you imagine? It could be in 10 years.

[00:14:25] Eric Perreault: I think Northwestern Research today is phenomenal. Where we have world-class researchers, again, as I mentioned earlier, across a range of domains. Where do we wanna go? I think there are reasons for us to grow in order to build upon the strengths we have right now and to grow into new areas. And I wanna see Northwestern continue to be thought of as a leader in the world, not only for the amount of funds we bring to campus or the great scientific papers we put out, for the impact that those discoveries are having on the world. And that impact is both in terms of the translation that we talked about earlier, but also the great minds that we produce here. As we said, this is a really special ecosystem we have on campus, and the more students and trainees we can bring to our campus and train them and have them go out to do great work on their own, I think that's the kind of thing that will make us proud as a university.

[00:15:14] Erin Spain, MS: How would you complete this sentence at Northwestern collaboration isn't just some. We do. It's,

[00:15:21] Eric Perreault: It's who we are. It's also how we turn our great discoveries and the ideas that we have as individuals into ideas that can have an impact on society.

[00:15:31] Erin Spain, MS: Well thank you so much for being on the show and talking about all the fantastic work happening in the office for research at Northwestern University, and we look forward to all of the things ahead.

[00:15:42] Eric Perreault: Thank you., Erin. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

[00:15:44] Erin Spain, MS: Subscribe to Science in Translation wherever you listen to your podcasts. To find out more about NUCATS, check out our website, NUCATS.northwestern.edu.