From Vision to Action
A New World
Why the Research Enterprise Must Evolve
The world confronting universities is changing at an unprecedented pace, and research universities are being reshaped by forces that show no sign of slowing. Discovery is accelerating and technologies like artificial intelligence are remaking every sector, including education. The problems that matter most – in water, health, energy, security, and the future of the environment and our communities – no longer respect the boundaries of any single discipline. These are systems-level challenges which require systems-level responses that draw science, engineering, health, policy, the social sciences, arts, and humanities into common purpose.
A university built for this world cannot rely on research excellence alone. Excellence remains the foundation, but the institutions that lead will be those that connect discovery with application, align faculty strength with emerging need, and organize around problems too complex for any one college to own.
The way research is funded is changing alongside the work itself. The federal government has long been the bedrock of American research and remains indispensable – but no university positioned for the future can depend on a single source. Federal priorities shift and competition intensifies, even as industry, foundations, and philanthropy invest more deliberately in the grand challenges universities exist to solve. These partners bring more than capital – real-world context, pathways to impact, and a shared stake in outcomes. A diversified, resilient funding base is no longer a development goal set apart from the mission; it is part of how a serious research enterprise sustains ambitious work.
The expectations placed on that work are rising as well. Society increasingly asks its universities to show what discovery returns – not only papers and prestige, but new companies and jobs, technologies carried to market, and solutions delivered to communities and the state. Impact is becoming a measure of research, not merely a byproduct of it. For a land-grant university this is familiar ground: translating knowledge into public benefit is written into its purpose. What is new is the scale and urgency of the expectation – and the chance, for a university willing to organize around it, to make impact a defining strength.
The University of Arizona is well positioned to meet this moment. Its land-grant mission, research breadth, and long practice of interdisciplinary work give it a foundation few institutions can match. The task ahead is not to rebuild that foundation but to focus it – to concentrate institutional energy where the university's strengths meet emerging needs, and to pursue impact at greater scale.
That work begins with vision: clarity about where the university is going and what it is prepared to build. That clarity comes from the university's Strategic Imperatives, including from the charge to pursue "Research that Shapes the Future."
The University of Arizona Strategic Vision
Research that Shapes the Future
The university’s vision is to be the University for Arizona and a keystone institution whose role is to help Arizona thrive. As the state’s flagship, land-grant university, the U of A is converging around three shared strategic imperatives, with student success as its North Star. Together, those imperatives place the university’s research mission within a larger public purpose.
The Success for Every Student imperative names research and experiential learning as central to how students grow – not as enrichment but as the way discovery becomes teaching. Community Engagement and Place-Based Excellence rests on the land-grant and Cooperative Extension mission – at its core, research carried home to Arizona's communities and their regional challenges. Between them sits Research that Shapes the Future: the discovery engine that supplies both the knowledge that trains the students and the insight the University brings to the state. Remove research from the University's mission and all three imperatives lose their power source. This is why the research enterprise cannot be understood as one priority among several. It is the connective tissue of the whole.
That is also why the charge to pursue Research that Shapes the Future belongs to every corner of the university. The strategic imperative defines that charge in deliberately broad terms, encompassing climate and sustainability science, water resources, astronomy, the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. The imperative asks the university's scholarship and creative work to transcend disciplines and confront urgent challenges by drawing on the advantages of place, distinctive expertise, and transdisciplinary collaboration. It is not a call to do more of what already works, but to focus – building genuine strengths, driving convergence across fields, and growing the scale and reach of a billion-dollar research enterprise through targeted investment, deeper partnerships, and collaboration with tribal nations, industry, government, communities, and the world.
This Strategic Forecast Portfolio begins from this charge. Each forecast represents a domain where a problem has grown so complex and entangled across disciplines that meeting it requires the whole institution to organize around it – concentrated expressions of a mission that belongs to everyone. The foundational and disciplinary research underway in every college is the wellspring this work draws from, and sustaining that full breadth of inquiry remains central to the university's purpose. Focus and breadth are not in tension here; the forecasts are what focus looks like when it is drawn from strength.
ORP… From Vision to Action
Turning Strategic Vision into Research Enterprise Capability
ORP's work begins with the question that follows from the university's vision: how does that vision become an organized research enterprise – one capable of advancing discovery, attracting investment, deepening partnerships, and creating impact at scale?
That responsibility asks for more than supporting research already underway. It calls for connecting faculty expertise, institutional capabilities, emerging needs, and partner priorities into areas where the university can lead with distinction. ORP's role is to create that connective framework – one that makes the university's research strengths more visible, more coordinated, and more capable of responding to opportunities no single discipline, college, or program can reach alone.
At the heart of this approach is collaboration: the university acting not only as a producer of knowledge but as a convener of people, ideas, resources, and partners – public and private, government and industry, foundations and investors – working together to address complex challenges and carry discovery toward application and impact.
What makes this approach powerful is that it does not narrow the university's research; it opens it. When genuine strengths converge on profound challenges, the work does not stay within its original boundaries. It raises new questions, builds new capabilities, and forges new collaborations that reach across every college and discipline. A discovery in the laboratory can open a question for the humanities; a challenge in the community can call on engineering, law, medicine, and the arts all at once. Focus, applied this way, is not a constraint on the research enterprise but a catalyst for it – a source of momentum that opens frontiers well beyond the challenge that first set it in motion.
Each forecast is not a boundary around what the university values and is not a ranking of what matters most. Every faculty member has a place in this enterprise, because it is defined not by a fixed set of fields but by a shared way of bringing strength to bear on the challenges that matter.
This is what turns vision into action. Strategic priorities become more than aspiration when they are joined to people, facilities, partnerships, funding pathways, and sustained commitment. ORP's work is to bring those elements together with clarity and purpose so the university can move from distributed excellence toward organized research advantage.
Strategic Forecast Portfolio
Building the Research Enterprise of Tomorrow
This Strategic Forecast Portfolio is one expression of a larger research enterprise taking shape at the University of Arizona. Viewed individually, each forecast identifies a path toward leadership in an area of consequence. Viewed together, they reveal something larger: an emerging research enterprise organized around connection, purpose, and impact. Across the portfolio, a common pattern holds. Each opportunity demands interdisciplinary collaboration. Each depends on partnership beyond the university. Each draws on Arizona's people, place, and mission. Each points toward a future in which research is not only excellent, but organized to make a difference.
The forecasts themselves are faculty- and staff-driven. Leaders and colleagues from across the university came together first in broad groups, bringing perspectives from a range of disciplines to examine each area and the U of A's strengths within it. Smaller working groups totaling more than 120 faculty and staff then took that work forward, developing the forecasts that follow — identifying where each field is headed, where our strengths create distinctive opportunities, and where greater focus, investment, and partnership can position the U of A to lead. ORP convened and supported this process, but the thinking at its core came from U of A faculty and staff.
Five of the forecasts chart the path for our existing Strategic Research Initiatives.
The orbital and cislunar domains are being remade by strategic competition, and the nation needs partners who can carry discovery to mission at speed. The U of A brings depth in optics, space situational awareness, AI-enabled autonomy, and mission operations – from the largest academic telescope network tracking objects in orbit to decades of planetary imaging. The opportunity is a national center of excellence serving national purpose.
View the Space and National Security overview (PDF)
Read the full Space and National Security report → (U of A NetID required)
Fusion is nearing commercial energy, and the hardest barriers now lie not in the physics but in the engineering – materials, manufacturing, and whole-system integration. This is where U of A can lead. Building on optics and laser engineering, high-temperature materials, precision manufacturing, and fuel-cycle and systems engineering, the University can carry fusion from laboratory breakthrough to engineering reality – not by building a power plant, but by making one possible.
View the Fusion Energy overview (PDF)
Read the full Fusion Energy report → (U of A NetID required)
Artificial intelligence is remaking health care, and the institutions that matter will make it responsible, equitable, and real in the clinic. The U of A is built for that test: a deep partnership with Banner Health, national strength in cancer research and medical imaging, land-grant reach into rural, border, and Tribal communities, and proven commercialization pathways. The aspiration is to define trustworthy AI in health – and prove it where care is hardest.
View the Responsible AI-Driven Health Innovation overview (PDF)
Read the full Responsible AI-Driven Health Innovation report → (U of A NetID required)
The minerals that power modern technology and defense remain dependent on foreign supply, making responsible sourcing a matter of national security. Few universities are positioned as the U of A is: expertise in mineral systems and porphyry copper, working field sites and research centers, deep industry relationships, and hard-won trust with communities and Tribal Nations. The opportunity is to define a mining future that is advanced, environmentally sound, and publicly trusted – not merely to join it.
View the Sustainable Mining and Critical Minerals overview (PDF)
Read the full Sustainable Mining and Critical Minerals report → (U of A NetID required)
Agriculture has entered a period of permanent constraint – less water, more heat, harder soils – and Arizona sits at the leading edge of that shift. The University's breadth runs across crops and livestock, water-smart production, and the Extension network that carries knowledge to producers, backed by trust with rural and Tribal communities. The opportunity is singular: to become the world's leading institution for agriculture under constraint.
View the Arid Lands Agriculture overview (PDF)
Read the full Arid Lands Agriculture report → (U of A NetID required)
The Wider Research Enterprise
Each of the five areas above represents a university commitment to organize, invest, and lead.
Strategic focus must evolve with the research enterprise itself. New knowledge creates new possibilities. Faculty develop new areas of expertise. Technologies change. Partnerships grow. The needs of Arizona, the nation and the world evolve. As they do, the U of A continues to look across its research enterprise for areas where existing and emerging strengths can converge around significant challenges — and where greater connection, coordination and investment could create new opportunities to lead and create impact.
Three other forecasts – Water, Environment and Health, and Quantum Research and Technology – represent other areas we are exploring for growth. Each is already grounded in significant research and expertise at the U of A.
Declining Colorado River flows, stressed groundwater, and intensifying climate extremes have made water the defining strategic challenge of the arid West — and Arizona is where its future will be worked out first. The University's depth spans water science, advanced treatment, governance, and the trusted partnerships that carry solutions into practice. The aspiration is to become the national reference point for water security in arid regions.
Read the full Water Research report → (U of A NetID required)
One in three people lives in a hot or arid region, and the health consequences — respiratory, cardiovascular, and infectious — are already measurable. No other university sits where the U of A does, at the intersection of extreme heat, degraded air, water scarcity, and climate-sensitive disease. Its strength is connecting environmental science, clinical medicine, toxicology, and community partnership into solutions. The aspiration is to lead the world in protecting health as the environment changes.
Read the full Environment and Health report → (U of A NetID required)
Quantum is entering a decade of intense national investment in a crowded field where breadth without depth is a losing strategy. The U of A's answer is concentration: building genuine mass at the nexus of quantum sensing, photonics, and materials and devices, grown from world-class strength in optics and instrumentation. Tied to its leadership in space and national security, that focus turns scattered activity into distinction — a place that leads rather than participates.
View the Quantum Research overview (PDF)
Read the full Quantum Research report → (U of A NetID required)
Taken together, these eight forecasts are not simply a set of reports; they are evidence of a research enterprise being built with greater intention – one that connects faculty, facilities, students, partners, and public purpose into a more visible and durable platform for impact.
Great research universities do not simply respond to the future; they build the research enterprise to shape it.