Cornell joins multi-institution IRIS research consortium

Cornell has signed on as an official member of the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS), a consortium of America’s leading higher education institutions focused on providing data to demonstrate the public value of sponsored scientific research.

IRIS was founded in 2015 and is housed at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, the world’s largest academic social science survey and research organization. Cornell has participated in IRIS for several years, attending annual conferences and meeting with its staff. 

“We are very pleased to join the IRIS community and look forward to sharing our data and making use of the valuable datasets in the IRIS repository,” said Emmanuel Giannelis, vice provost for research and vice president for technology transfer, intellectual property and research policy.

“Accurate data on the economic impact of research and the career paths of researchers are very challenging to acquire yet critical to designing effective strategies for increasing Cornell’s contribution to innovation and economic advancement in the U.S. and around the world,” Giannelis said. “IRIS data is a unique and highly valuable resource for this purpose.”

With more than $1 billion in research funding, Cornell was in the top 10 in Reuters’ 2019 ranking of the World’s Most Innovative Universities.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Cornell into the IRIS family,” said Jason Owen-Smith, IRIS executive director and professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. “Cornell’s role in the U.S. research community is very important, and its data on its research operations will be a hugely valuable addition to the IRIS dataset.”

Cornell’s membership also means that all researchers on campus will have no-cost access to the IRIS dataset, which illustrates the impact of funded research – including economic development and the career paths of faculty, students and employees.

IRIS will also supply Cornell with detailed reports on research spending, research vendors, and the employment and earnings of research-trained employees. IRIS reports are used to inform various stakeholders about the wide-ranging impacts of research investments.

The IRIS data repository includes transaction-level information on nearly 400,000 sponsored projects that represent more than $83 billion in direct-cost expenditures and employ more than 643,000 people at 31 member universities. These data are linked to information on scientific outcomes at multiple levels of analysis.

Data are made available to researchers after being rigorously anonymized to remove any personal information.

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Rebecca Valli