View from the Top:
Interview with Arthur Bienenstock

As Stanford’s Vice Provost and Dean of Research and Graduate Policy, Arthur Bienenstock is responsible for the support of research and graduate scholarship, including the Office of Technology Licensing. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Bienenstock was the director of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) and served as the associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) under President Clinton. When Dr. Bienenstock was recently presented with the DOE Distinguished Associate Award, U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said “You have elegantly brought together diverse ideas, peoples, and institutions to work together.” When Brainstorm interviewed Dr. Bienenstock, Secretary Bodman’s statement rang true - Stanford’s Dean of Research works to improve science and technology by bringing people together.

Brainstorm: Tell us about some of the highlights of your career. What experiences have shaped your opinions on research and innovation?

Arthur Bienenstock: Consulting had a dramatic effect on my outlook because I began consulting very early in my career, for a highly creative inventor, and got a sense of the way inventors function. It was amazing to watch as a person takes some new scientific fact and very soon afterwards makes a new product available.
The second thing that had an enormous effect on me was directing the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. One of the big impacts that experience had on me was to see the need for different types of people in a large, complex operation. You want highly creative scientists who think of the way-out things. At the same time, you need the scientists and engineers who can transform the way-out ideas into reality. I think some people overvalue one sort of person, or some overvalue the other type. In fact, if you’re going to have a cutting edge facility of that sort, you need both types. And what’s more, you gain appreciation for the infrastructure people – the people who make sure that you know exactly how much money you have, as well as purchasing and receiving, the value of a very good receptionist, all of these things became apparent to me in a way that I hadn’t really thought about prior to being the SSRL director.

B: Your appointment to the OSTP was a significant achievement during your career. How has having a national perspective on research influenced your role as Dean of Research (DOR)?

AB: I had become aware, as SSRL director, of the importance of the government- university research partnership. What I became aware of at OSTP is that we can influence it.
At the moment we’ve got a very significant challenge from Washington, and that is a proposed change in the rules involving export. There is a phenomenon known as deemed exports, and that is giving any technical information to foreign nationals. Universities are excluded from these deemed export rules. And it’s really important for the country that universities continue to be excluded because a significant portion of our science and technology workforce comes as a result of students from other countries coming to the United States to study and to stay on. What’s more, it would mean that we would have to secure probably every laboratory that has an instrument such as a high end computer or Global Positioning System (GPS). And that would change the nature of this university.
Another thing that came out of that was a sense of the importance of building alliances with both industry and government laboratories, to insure the voices of science and technology are very impartial.

B: You’ve stated in the past, “The university must continue to seek better ways of facilitating research at the intersections of the disciplines, while maintaining the strengths of the disciplines themselves.” How are you moving this initiative forward and what challenges have you encountered along the way?

AB: I continue to believe that some of the most exciting research is at the intersections of the disciplines. And this institution is moving to foster the research in which our faculty and students from different schools and different departments work together. I’m working with the directors of the interdisciplinary programs that report to this office, and trying to stay very close to the Deans of the Schools of Humanities & Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sometimes the goals of different departments are in conflict and you’ve got to manage those conflicts so that you keep both the disciplines and the interdisciplinary programs strong.

B: You have identified the following as priorities: attracting more members of underrepresented groups into advanced studies and obtaining faculty and student access to instrumentation that is extremely expensive. Have you made any progress on any of these goals?

AB: Attracting more members of underrepresented groups into advanced studies is probably the harder and the more important problem. Just as the nation needs foreign nationals to enter science and technology, it needs our women and our ethnic minorities to
enter these fields. Our immediate efforts are aimed at ensuring that those we admit actually enroll. We are also following up on a suggestion of the Diversity Committee of the Graduate Student Council. That is, we’re going to explore what we can learn from
successes that might be applied to the areas where we’ve been less successful.
I said that I wanted to keep working on access to instrumentation that is expensive to purchase, operate and maintain. I’m serving on a committee of the National Research Council (chaired by Professor Robert Sinclair), that is looking at how the government might provide medium-sized facilities that could be very expensive. We are examining our own policies to ensure that we can meet not only our own needs for expensive instrumentation, but the needs of other academic institutions around our area. I think that there will be instruments that not only our own students should have access to, but so should the students of San Jose State, and other universities. I was really pleased when Professor Sinclair proposed to team up with the community colleges that train students in using that type of sophisticated instrument. We want to ensure that our policies permit faculty and students from other such institutions to have access to our facilities.
The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory is an example of such a facility. It provides very modern instrumentation to the whole area. I think that it opened up for the nation, a new kind of facility where people could come in, use it for a few days or a week and leave. People from academia and industry from around the country, in fact from around the world, could come and use SSRL. We at Stanford benefited from the facility, but also from the interactions with outstanding scientists from around the country and the world, so I like that model very much. I think it’s been adapted widely now and will continue on.

B: Many view Stanford as an innovative research university on multiple levels. What are additional ways in which we can foster innovation?

AB: First of all, we have to keep getting great faculty and students, and that means that we cannot ignore issues like export control. My fear is that foreign nationals will cease to come to the United States in the numbers that they have been. Central to everything is good people. The second is that we have to insure that the faculty, the staff, and the students have the infrastructure and the instrumentation they need. And the third, in which this institution is so good, is to ensure that the barriers between departments and schools remain very small. Stanford is different from most universities in this respect and I think that fosters innovation. You can see it in the strength that we have in fields like computer music.

B: What is your view on technology transfer?

AB: I take seriously the responsibility of universities to get their innovations out into the marketplace so they strengthen the nation’s economy. That is the primary goal – not to make money, but to get the inventions out into the market. OTL does that very well and, as a consequence, we make a lot of money and also acquire valuable friends. That money is used partly to give our young faculty a chance to try new things. Part of it is used to get new scientific instrumentation.
In the long run, this institution thrives when our economy thrives, and we have good relationships with our industrial neighbors. Consider, for example, the debt that we owe to the Hewletts, the Packards, and the Varians, and the people like that who’ve supported us through the years, not through licensing income, but through gifts. Also, the companies around Palo Alto play an important role in helping to educate our graduates and undergraduates. So, we want to see an economy around us that’s thriving and innovative, and licensing is one of our ways in helping in that endeavor.

B: What do you think university-industry relations will look like in 10 years?

AB: I think we’re seeing a trend of industry looking towards academia for long-term basic research. I find them increasingly acting as spokespersons for government funding of academic research, and as consortia members that provide financial assistance for long-term innovative research - the sort of generic research the whole industry will use in twenty years. We see the semiconductor industry as a leader in that; I suspect we will see other industries go more and more in that direction.