May 2025 Inside the Institute Newsletter
A Message from Rob McCarley
Executive Director, The Fralin Life Sciences Institute
Those who successfully navigated commencement ceremonies, torrential downpours, and last-minute changes of late are a resilient lot. So are our Institute affiliates as they face straight-on the unexpected challenges regarding the current funding landscape and the changing environment of higher education.
Resilience—the ability to respond to unexpected events and create an alternative path to a “new version of success”—often comes from within. Those internal capabilities result from prior experiences and the lessons learned, coupled with careful discernment about strategies and an unflinching commitment to be a force for positive change.
I have learned a lot from our affiliates about mechanisms to leverage their resilience and increase the depth of single discipline and scope of interdisciplinary scholarly activities. These creative mechanisms are allowing them to advance Global Distinction efforts, even while facing the great uncertainty we are all experiencing.
Many of those approaches align with priorities of the Institute and the Office of Research and Innovation, such as investing in: key infrastructure; approaches enabling integration of research expertise for synergistic outcomes; and mechanisms for elevating awareness of the impact of scholarly and research activities by FLSI affiliates. While there are ORI resources for new funding possibilities, including partnerships with industry, as well as FLSI funding opportunities, those are just the starting points for creating the best environment for faculty to feel supported in their research and scholarly activities.
To that end, the FLSI is launching the Executive Director’s Initiative for Research Resilience (EDIRR) on July 1. The EDIRR is focused on certain life sciences awards, which have been terminated by an agency and selected by Virginia Tech senior management for consideration. In addition, the Institute is exploring pathways for facilitating the pivoting of affiliate research to new areas aligned with funding priorities of a variety of entities. Stay tuned for more information on the research pivoting program.
The stories in this newsletter reflect amazing outcomes from the wisdom, commitment, and efforts of the FLSI community. From the impressive accomplishments of 2025 graduates, inaugural awards to faculty affiliates, to the recognition of outcomes with innovation, your hard work is yielding results that provide additional evidence for the need of the FLSI and Virginia Tech to further support and grow those endeavors. As encapsulated by some of our affiliates’ highlighted research with bacteriophages and drug-resistant bacteria, your successes result from the resilience that comes from within to yield distinctive outcomes with global impact!
Let’s go Hokies, and let’s go FLSI!
