By Lorne A. Whitehead, Scott H. Slovic and Janet E. Nelson
2. Scott H. Slovic (biography)
3. Janet E. Nelson (biography)
How can we recognize and encourage investigations that holistically fuse fundamental and applied research on a problem of interest in a manner that is both (a) integrative and recursive and (b) highly collaborative with non-university experts?
Recognition
We refer to this form of research as “Highly Integrative Basic And Responsive” (HIBAR). It adds deep university-society engagement to the work that Donald Stokes named “Pasteur’s quadrant” (Stokes 1997) and others have called “use-inspired basic research”.
As shown in the figure below, basic research projects emphasize one end of a range of research excellence, while applied research projects emphasize the other. The two distributions overlap only weakly, so the intermediate portion is often underemphasized. HIBAR research fills and bridges that gap, linking basic and the practical research in an iterative, recursive manner.