Local Research for Local Problems
Since World War II, federal funding has been the central driver of American scientific research. Recently, a state-based model for research shows how local research could be used to solve local problems.
On this episode, host Lisa Margonelli is joined by Jeffrey Warren, executive director of the North Carolina Collaboratory. About ten years ago, the North Carolina legislature created a way to get answers to policymakers’ questions and to fund research to solve local problems. The Collaboratory contracts with researchers at the state’s universities to do the work. So far, the legislature has allocated more than $300 million to fund 800 research projects on subjects ranging from water pollution to opioid addiction treatment to foster care. The Collaboratory’s model offers a new vision for how science can respond to society’s needs.
Resources
- Visit the North Carolina Collaboratory’s website to learn more about their work.
- Check out Jeffrey Warren’s Issues pieces for more on the Collaboratory’s unique model of bipartisan problem solving.
- “Science for Hyper-Partisan Times” (2021).
- “Research That Solves North Carolina’s Problems” (2026), co-authored with Blair Ellis Rhoades.
Transcript
Lisa Margonelli: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor-in-chief at Issues.
Since the end of World War II, federal funding has been the central driver of American scientific research. On this episode, we’re exploring a different model that comes from North Carolina. About 10 years ago, the legislature founded the North Carolina Collaboratory to answer questions and solve local problems by contracting with researchers from the state’s universities.
So far, the legislature has allocated more than $300 million to fund 800 studies on subjects ranging from water pollution to opioid addiction to foster care. I’m joined by the Collaboratory’s executive director, Jeffrey Warren. Jeff, welcome.
Jeff Warren: Thank you, Lisa. It’s great to be here.
Lisa Margonelli: Jeff, I’m very excited to talk to you because for the past 10 years, the Collaboratory has been this very interesting experiment or working proof in North Carolina. For people who listen to this podcast, you know that we often talk about three separate issues as completely separate issues. One is providing evidence for policymakers, another one is doing research that solves local problems, and the third thing is making research universities relevant and maybe even beloved in the states where they are.
Amazingly, the Collaboratory hits on all three of these things with a single Collaboratory hammer. So, I just wanted to start by asking you, what is the Collaboratory?
Jeff Warren: Yeah, it’s a funny name, right? So Collaboratory was actually coined in a National Academies report about IT back in the ’80s, but it was a laboratory without walls, so former chancellor Carol Folt decided that they should just use the name Collaboratory.
And when we were originally created, we were the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory right out of the gate. I think the best way to describe it to people is we’re either the legislature’s front porch to academic research or alternatively, we’re essentially a funding agency within a university, within a university system, within a state of universities, both public and private because we have the ability to work with any institution of higher learning across North Carolina.
But we’re also the bridge. So, maybe the third way I would describe us is the bridge between the policymakers and the researchers, and often that bridge also has a spur into the communities and the stakeholders that we serve. We love to partner our researchers with actual government officials or community members to make the research more relevant.
We love to partner our researchers with actual government officials or community members to make the research more relevant.
And maybe the fourth way I might describe us would be a state-level DARPA, right? We like to have the challenge in front of us and then go find the smart people to say, “Hey, can you solve this?” And PFAS, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, that’s probably the best example of something where we just threw it out into the ether and said, “Any big brains wanna spend some time and try and find a better way to get this stuff out of the water?”
Lisa Margonelli: I want to talk about PFAS in a second, but before we talk about that, I want to just say, this is the 10th anniversary of the Collaboratory. You started in 2016, in the middle of July. At that time, I think you had one full-time employee and a million dollars a year from the legislature.
So, you are a funding agency. The legislature gave you some funding, a little pot of money, and then the idea was the legislature was going to ask the Collaboratory questions, and you guys were going to go out to the university, get people to answer them, have a little funding to do that. What just happened with the budget this year?
Jeff Warren: We set records across all metrics this year.
It’s great that it happened on our 10th anniversary, but that’s happenstance, right? So we just had a record year of funding, of state-only funds. So, we had a record number of studies. Our total new funding this year was just shy of $60 million. From our one million recurring, we got an additional $7.5 million in recurring dollars now, so we’re at 20.6.
And then all of the other one-off, non-recurring pots of money to do things in firefighting, fire station research, opioid research, K-12 curriculum development, those single pots of money. So, we’re right at about $70 million in the budget. And so, the total take now, for 10 years, if anybody’s doing the math, starting at one million in that first year, we’ve now received just over $300 million in new money coming into academic research, in 10 years.
That’s an amazing milestone to hit. And the other records we set, if you look at the number of legislatively mandated studies, they vary from zero to four in the past nine years. There was one year, we didn’t get any. Some years we got one, some two. Our record was four. This year we got 25. They’re still in session, so we might get more.
Lisa Margonelli: So you went up to 25 different funded questions, and I think you’ve done about 800 projects with North Carolina’s universities over the full lifespan. More importantly, when a legislature goes from spending a million dollars a year to spending $75 million, that sort of shows that something has been proven. They appreciate this process at some level. It’s pretty big validation because legislators can give out plaques and they can create things, but they don’t always give them money.
Jeff Warren: Right. In the beginning, we had headwinds for sure. There was a lot of political controversy over the fact the Republican legislature was creating this, and I had been a Republican staffer with the state Senate and was chosen to come over and run it the following year in 2017. So I was the first full-time employee.
Lisa Margonelli: Yeah. Can we just rewind a little bit to that moment? So it’s 2017. It was the first Republican majority in North Carolina’s legislature for a really long time. It was right after Trump was elected, or, I mean, I guess this happened before Trump’s 2016 election.
Jeff Warren: Yeah, well, let’s rewind a little before that just for context for the listeners outside of North Carolina. So, it was the 2010 election that was the seismic event in legislative shakeup in North Carolina. So, the first time in 141 years, so shortly after the Civil War, that Republicans had gained control again in both chambers of the legislature.
The House had flipped only two or three times, but the Senate had remained staunchly in Democrat control since shortly after the Civil War. So, 2010 was a big election. In 2011, they came in, and they still hold the majorities in both chambers, the Senate a super majority and the House a simple majority. And I was a staffer coming in 2011 as part of that, as the science advisor to the state senate leader, Phil Berger.
I saw two different types of studies is the easiest way to generalize this. Studies that start as studies, that the legislature wants to mandate, you know, officially ask a question, send it to somebody to answer the question. And then there’s what I call the door prize studies, which are policies that can’t get enough votes, but they want to give the member credit back in their district, so they turn it into a study. Regardless of where you ended up, you had a study, and most of the time it would go to a state agency. Most of the time it would not have any money attached to it. Most of the time it would be a very quick turnaround because they wanted to try and get the information and the data and the recommendations before the next legislative session so they could potentially justify making a policy change. And I had complained for many years that we should be utilizing our university system to answer some of these questions, to do academic research.
And then there were some headwinds there and some challenges. We have 17 campuses in our UNC system, 15 of them are research universities. And then there was sometimes, well, which university should we send it to? If you could then choose a university, then the question is, okay, then who’s going to do it at the university?
Are we going to write the scope in the budget? If it got money, how long? Because legislators are time-sensitive, and they’re not patient. And so doing a two to three-year study was always out of the question because that was outside of their biennial period, right? So they wouldn’t be around even for the results potentially. If you could get money, it often takes the state budget office three to four months to certify that budget and move cash. And so, if you get a late budget in October, the university might be getting the money in January, if they knew it was even coming. You’ve got to stand up the research, and then the money reverts at the end of the fiscal year on June 30th.
I had complained for many years that we should be utilizing our university system to answer some of these questions, to do academic research.
So there were all of these challenges and having these evolving conversations, the thought was there just needs to be a central clearing house, a central office to manage all this. An air traffic controller, for lack of a better analog, that could receive the requests, that would have the relationships. You might have a world-class researcher in water science, but they may not have the bandwidth, right? They may not have the postdoc. They may have four other grants they’re finishing up. So you’ve got to find another water scientist. Or you might have some budding water scientists at the small universities that you want to give a junior faculty an opportunity to grow and help build up that research infrastructure in the state.
So, choosing the research team is probably 75% of what we do on the front end of a project. That’s kind of the genesis of this, but the general concern was this is just going to bastardize research, that was biased and the Republicans just basically wanted to get the data that would help them roll back more environmental regulations.
Lisa Margonelli: So that was the feeling among the academics… I mean, I think one of the articles used the phrase “tame science.” They’re going to create tame science that can be used to argue specific points. But then once you had this research organization, the Collaboratory set up, that started to shift.
Jeff Warren: Yeah, there was a lot of wearing out shoe leather, right? There were a lot of just meetings, winning people over one at a time, starting here at Chapel Hill because we were local, but then also reaching out to other campuses, letting them know that even though we were headquartered at Chapel Hill, we were going to work with them as well because we wanted to bring in the breadth of experience across the state. If I need to do research centered on Appalachia, I really need to be going to my Appalachian universities, Western Carolina, UNC Asheville, App State, and not Chapel Hill and not UNC Wilmington. If I’m doing coastal work, let’s go talk to East Carolina, and UNC has a marine lab, and Duke has a marine lab, and UNCW has a marine lab.
And the majority of our studies are actually in the social sciences. We didn’t split the portfolio until two years ago and right ahead of getting the Office of Learning Research and kind of scratched my head and said, “Wow, we’re already kind of doing some opioid research, and now this K-12 mandate and we’re doing a little bit of foster care pilot work. I probably need two research directors, one that’s a social scientist, one that’s a physical scientist, because they approach things totally differently.”
Another thing that really stuck in the craw of a lot of the faculty was this organization, the Collaboratory, was set up on the finance and operations side of the university and not under the provost. So it was under the vice chancellor of finance and ops, essentially the CFO. And now the provost being the chief academic officer, and a lot of people were saying, “See, they’re just gonna undermine academic integrity.” But I will say that was probably one of the most brilliant decisions ever before I arrived. Because, like you stated, Lisa, we are a funding agency. We spend the majority of our time moving money around our campus, UNC system campuses, private campuses, we gotta send checks to them because they’re not on the central accounting system, state agencies. We’re doing purchase contracts, buying analytical equipment. So, you know, 80% of what we do is finance and operations anyway.
Lisa Margonelli: So that gave you flexibility, the fact that you weren’t there, and you also were separate from the Office of Sponsored Research, which is obviously a different category for the university.
Jeff Warren: Correct. Correct. So we operate outside of that. We have from the beginning, and from the beginning we were barred from charging indirect because these were not federal dollars, right? And these were tax dollars and totally different model, and the legislature was like, “We want our money to go 100% to direct costs related to the research and not into this indirect pot.” So of course, this delights researchers that know they get 100% of our grants, but it frustrates administrators that want a cut, and we just don’t allow that.
Lisa Margonelli: One other question then is, um, there was also a structure that was set up, there was a review board that I think was under the provost.
Jeff Warren: Absolutely. And so that was right out of the gate. That was a way to try and win over some faculty and let them know there would be oversight. So, we still have an advisory board. We still have our same chairman after 10 years, and many of our same advisory board members were here from the beginning. I think we’ve got seven advisory board members right now appointed by the provost, and so that was to try and help preserve the academic integrity and know there were some watchful eyes over this and people that could give advice and help make connections, right? Because we would go to them early on, “Hey, who do you know that does soil research,” right? “Who do you know that does animal population studies? Who do you know that manages forest fires and fuel loading?” Because again, in the beginning it was all environmental work, and that really shifted during the pandemic. And then, at about that same time, we got codified in statute, and it opened the fairway up. Now we can study anything we would like, and we’re seeing that the legislature’s giving us studies all over the spectrum.
Lisa Margonelli: That’s interesting. And so part of this also involved becoming codified in statute. So I want to just talk a little bit about the work on PFAS, because it’s such an interesting example of some of the core environmental work. It’s a tremendous issue in North Carolina, the question of whether or not drinking water is contaminated with the so-called forever chemicals, the PFAS. And it was early on, it was a big project that you all had to take on.
Jeff Warren: Yeah. That was our first inflection point. That was 2018 and the first Water Safety Act, which was in the budget, and that was $5,013,000. I still remember it. Why the $13,000? But we’ll take it. That should’ve been a rounding error.
We were mandated to set up the PFAS testing network, and there were five universities there. So Chapel Hill, UNC Wilmington, NC State, UNC Charlotte, Duke, and actually NC A&T. So it was six universities, and I might be missing one. But now it’s grown to 11 universities, and it’s also kind of evolved. So the original approach, and I remember when Senator Michael Lee called me to talk about that, and he’s still in the legislature today. Uh, Wilmington is his home district. They are the receiver of all the things coming down the Cape Fear Basin ’cause they flow into the Atlantic.
So Wilmington, North Carolina really became ground zero and just downstream from the Chemours facility in Cumberland County, just outside of Fayetteville, North Carolina. And so he said, “You know, Jeff, what should we do on this? This is kind of an emerging issue. We don’t really know a lot about it.” And I said, “You know, Senator, I’ll put on my citizen hat here. As a taxpayer, I think this is something government should absolutely do, is utilize the experts in this area, and let’s just do a baseline. Let’s answer the… the first couple of questions we should answer are what PFAS are we finding? You know, the EPA, on their tox screen database, there are more than 15,000 individual PFAS comments. So what are we finding here, where, and in what concentrations?” There were a few other studies in there about water versus air and looking at potential technologies to remove them, but the majority of that was focused on water, and it was focused on raw water supplies for public water and we were to take raw samples.
That kind of started what we continue now, which we branded as the PFAS Research Network. And we actually have some of the world’s best researchers in PFAS in this state. So it was kismet in many ways that we, we’ve got the talent, we’ve done a lot of upgrading to analytical instruments. I’ve forgotten how many mass spectrometers I bought at this point, right? But we have the most advanced analytical fleet with these great researchers, probably any state in the nation doing, solely doing PFAS work.
Lisa Margonelli: So as I understand it, you have at least three components. You have one was the sort of monitoring or establishing baselines. The second is a whole project with local firefighters and firehouses, which may have the firefighting foam—we’re getting into tongue twister territory here—that contains PFAS, and there’s all sorts of spills and other things related to that. And then there’s a third aspect, which is that you’ve got a project that has found an original technology for actually removing PFAS from public water supplies by working with the municipal water supplies in several different towns. Let’s just quickly talk about what’s going on with the technology and how that came to be potentially a benefit to the people of North Carolina.
Jeff Warren: Absolutely. The two PIs on that project. We partnered chemistry with Frank Leibfarth and environmental science and engineering over at our Gillings School of Global Public Health. That’s Orlando Cornell, who’s a membrane water engineer, and they made a perfect couple. And they played around, they had an amazing grad student at the time who’s on all the patents, uh, Irene Manning. And uh, they’re like, “We think we can actually come up with a novel resin to actually remove this.” And they’ve been through multiple iterations now, but they actually are now designing bespoke resins based on the cocktail of concentrations in the compounds that they’re finding. And so they can design a resin specific to a waste stream, right?
The project was NCPURE, and the spinoff company, the startup company is Sorventa that holds the license to manufacture the resin. The challenge with that, and we actually got $10 million in the budget to benefit this program, so I’d gone to Senator Lee again in the legislature, and I said, “We’re actually onto something that looks really promising, and the only way we’re gonna know to de-risk this is to scale it up. And the only way to scale it up is money. And so I’m at a crossroads. We can either go and get angel investment money and private equity, uh, to do this and have to negotiate away 50, 60, 70% of the ownership of what I think is gonna be a very important product, or the legislature could make the investment, and the state and UNC will retain 100% of the ownership.” And in that conversation we said, “You know, but maybe we also need to ensure that a portion of the revenue goes back to the general fund and the taxpayer if they’re gonna take this risk.” So this is the first intellectual property created and owned by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the nation’s first public university.
This is the first IP that will share revenue back with the taxpayer. This is actually monumental in the structure. So 10% of gross revenue will go to the general fund. Another 10% of gross revenue will come to the Collaboratory for more PFAS research, so kinda like the flywheel to keep it going. But yeah, so we were able to scale it up and put it at two water treatment plants down in New Hanover County, which is the Wilmington area. We were able to put it in a wastewater facility in Burlington in Alamance County, which is just east of here. It’s in the Triad portion of the state, near Greensboro. And then we were able to do some early pilots here in Orange County, right here in Chapel Hill, Carrboro, at Orange Water and Sewer Authority.
And it is very promising. It is outperforming all of the peer technologies from GAC to ion exchange that we run through our columns at the sites. And yeah, so it’s removing more PFAS, it’s lasting longer, it’s cheaper, and then you can regenerate it, which makes it even cheaper. I think it’s very promising. We’re continuing to do more applications with that and I’m anxious to see where that goes over the next decade.
Lisa Margonelli: When you started this, did you think that… Working at the Collaboratory, the purpose was to inform the legislature. It was not to be an incubator for companies that would also work to solve North Carolina’s problems.
Jeff Warren: It was not, and that’s not primarily what we do, but it’s something we can do and something we will do if some of these technologies do percolate out of our funded research. What made that project feasible was we needed a lab, so we actually went out and leased space. And we also have a purchasing exemption, which when the Collaboratory invokes it for certain situations, we can bypass all purchasing policies and laws and move at the speed of light. So we were able to go out, scout the space, find the shell space, get the contractor, build it to our specs, get the equipment installed, get butts in chairs in 11 months.
Lisa Margonelli: That’s amazing.
Jeff Warren: That’s hard-pressed even for the private sector, but impossible for any level of state government and certainly a university to move that fast. So that is one reason that, you know, this was such a successful project. The main reason is we had really smart people that were also dedicated to serving the state and wanted to make the world a better place.
We have multiple unicorns in our ranks, those real special researchers that are top of their game, but they also have their heart in it, and they want to partner and address in-state issues and provide solutions.
They weren’t… Orlando and Frank were not the ones that were focused on publications and more grant money. They were the ones that were focused on, wow, this is actually gonna be good for humanity. They were doing it for all the right reasons. They, Orlando and Frank, are unicorns. And I could use so many more Orlandos and Franks. So we have multiple unicorns in our ranks, those real special researchers that are top of their game, but they also have their heart in it, and they want to partner and address in-state issues and provide solutions.
Lisa Margonelli: So this brings up a couple of different things. I mean, one thing is you’re able to find and support these unbelievably helpful unicorns within your own state and within the university system. I have sort of two different questions.
Let me back up. So you have to sort of police boundaries in a different way. You don’t get to be the sort of old university of, like, “Uh, we just do the science.” You are sort of in a middle space. So for example, when people complain, well, doing studies means that they’re putting off regulation, for example. You’re in a proximity to politics that I think is a little unfamiliar for science, even though they are often in that proximity. There was a study on fisheries that came out, and then there was a decision on shrimping, and you had to warn people, “This fisheries study is completely separate from the decision on shrimping.” So you also have to, like, police… You have to go into the media and say, like, “No, this study is not equal to that policy. They had just happened around the same time.” So talk to me a little bit about that.
Jeff Warren: Yeah. I’ll hit that last one first. We call that Shrimpgate around here. The way that rolled out is just a week or so before our multi-year report on fisheries management was due, you know, that was a $1.5 million investment, three years, and that was designed to be done to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Fisheries Reform Act and the 50th anniversary of the Coastal Area Management Act.
And so nobody was thinking about shrimp at the time, even though that was one of the species that was to be studied in the report. We had four different universities involved in that, and they just blood, sweat and tears and put their hearts and souls into it. And right before it was due, the Senate, unbeknownst to even me, came out and they got a bill, and they amended it to ban shrimp trawling in the sounds in North Carolina.
You could still ban out on the ocean side, uh, but you could no longer trawl. And a lot of people said, even legislators from both chambers had kind of started this rumor that, oh, the Senate acted so quickly because they wanted to get out ahead of the Collaboratory’s fisheries study because that study may say something that banning shrimp trawling is not a good idea or it’s not gonna impact the fisheries, right? And so that was really frustrating for us because it suggested collusion potentially. You know, was there something in there that shrimp trawling shouldn’t be banned, but now it was removed because the Senate took action and they had a behind-the-scenes meeting?
I very quickly had to set the record straight. And when we turned in the first preliminary release of that, we had to do another big data drop a couple months later because they were still finalizing the data It’s pretty much to say, like, “Look, nobody in the legislature has been working with our researchers, and shrimp trawling was never part of the scope of work of this project. While it might talk about shrimp, it’s not talking about shrimp trawling.” And nothing was removed, nothing was added, and legislators acted irresponsibly, and in fact, their comments have the potential to undermine the hard work of academics, well-respected academics, in their field across four universities.
And, and I wrote a very strongly worded letter, and I was a little worried that I might get my hand slapped on that, but then I just kind of thought, “No, this is the right thing to do.” This is what I need to do to defend our model and the integrity of our work and the integrity of our researchers because we are the “honest brokers” sensu Roger Pilke.
You know, that report has actually been very, very useful. Just last month we were down at the legislature at a working group with those researchers, and they’re still talking about the results from that report, and it is helping direct very complicated policy because that’s a battle of multiple users of one resource. There’s just not only the commercial and the recreational fishing side of it, there are also the other people that use the resources of the public waters.
Lisa Margonelli: Right. What is the Jeff Warren thing about being an honest broker?
Jeff Warren: The key word in that is honest. You’ve gotta be ethical and honest to yourself. You gotta be honest to what the university represents in academic research as a whole, and you’ve gotta be honest with the legislators, and you’ve gotta be honest with the academics themselves as well. And if you know any backstories and context, you need to tell them and say, “Look, I know this is what you want to study, but I’m telling you in context of conversations that I had, you’re studying the wrong thing. So your scope needs to answer these questions.”
And often we’ll bring the academics in before the study even kicks off so there can be a conversation and they can hear directly from the legislators, “Hey, here are the questions I need answered.” And sometimes the questions change during that discussion. It evolves and they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t think about that.” It’s very helpful to both parties to be involved in those types of pre-planning scoping discussions. And then it’s also to be honest with the legislature on simple things like due dates. Like, “Hey, we can’t do that in that timeframe.” I’m about to submit a memo for about 7 of these studies out of the 25, we can’t get them the results they want by March 1 of next year. If they’re really serious about this, they’re gonna give us the time we need, and in most cases that means another year. In one instance it means two more years.
And also when we’re talking about funding, they’re like, “Well, we were gonna give you $30,000 for that.” And one of my favorite retorts is, “Well, just like the price of eggs, research goes up too, so I can’t do this for $30,000. This is probably gonna be $125,000 study, and it’s gonna take 18 months.” So I think the biggest challenge is with legislators is just convincing them of the timescape that this takes and, and what it truly costs. And when you break down the cost, like, “Why does it cost $150,000?” Well, it’s two researchers, and a couple grad students, and some instrumentation cost, and some lab service, and some software licenses. And then you give a spreadsheet and break down the budget. They’re like, “Oh, well, that makes sense.”
I think, you know, circle back, the honest broker is just being honest, just being true to yourself, letting legislatures know the limitations of science, letting academics know that legislators are people too, that they just, they’re caring for their constituents. Letting legislators know that data are the data, but they could be interpreted different ways. And so I remember when I first came to this job, when I was leaving the legislature, I told Senator Berger, I said, “I’m gonna just tell you one thing, I will never bias a study in your favor. But what I will ensure you is that the studies we do will not be biased.”
And not to say that academic studies were being biased, but just having somebody that they knew, this relationship over in this giant campus with who do they call, I can help connect them to the right people. We can build trust, we can build relationships through conversations and meetings, and the sharing of documents. And I can get legislators in the field to watch the sampling, actually take water samples. I can get legislators in the lab to see this novel sorbent material. I can let them operate a mass spectrometer, and that’s really important. I see the ice thawing.
And I talk to the academics. They’re like, “Oh, that was actually a great conversation. They’re a great person. You know, even if they’re the opposite side of the aisle of me, their heart’s in the right place.” And the legislators are like, “Oh, they weren’t crazy at all. They were really smart and really well-established in their field, and great ideas.” And I’ve got legislators now calling me and saying, “Hey, I want you to shop this provision by doctors X and Y, and if they’ve got a problem with it, we need to address it. But I need their buy-in.” So that’s an amazing accomplishment. Like, literally that happened in the budget, that this member was only going to get behind it and put it in the budget if two professors that he was very comfortable with working with would support it. And we actually amended the language and we got their end ideas incorporated, and they were like, “Absolutely, we support it 100%. This is exactly how you should answer the question.” And that’s an amazing thing.
Lisa Margonelli: Yeah. So there is a growing narrative about how science is divisive in America’s current hyper-partisan culture. There’s talk of the Republicans having a war on science. Democrats put defiant signs on their lawns that say, “In this house, we believe in science.” We hear from pollsters that mothers used to share scientific studies in their group chats, and they don’t ’cause they’re worried that it will tear the group apart, basically. But the story of what the Collaboratory is doing is actually using science to bring people together to work on shared problems.
Can you talk a little bit about what’s going on? Like, you once wrote a piece for Issues called “Science for Hyper-Partisan Times.” And in some ways it seems like there is a route towards finding ways to work together, if not turning down the partisanship.
Jeff Warren: Yeah. I try to stay, you know, non-partisan in this stuff, but, you know, sometimes I do get frustrated with, you know, the trope Republicans hate science. I’m just gonna throw it out there, I’m a Republican. I’m a scientist. I love science and I truly believe that scientists should be at the table, of all stripes, of all walks of life, of all colors, all genders, all political parties, right? You know, if people were to say Republicans hate science, well, I’ll give you 308 million reasons why North Carolina Republicans don’t, right?
If people were to say Republicans hate science, well, I’ll give you 308 million reasons why North Carolina Republicans don’t.
Now, you get into the weeds and it gets complicated because science, just like everything else, can be weaponized, and it is weaponized, and I hate when our studies are weaponized. Science is complicated, science takes a long time, but it’s designed to be thorough, and it’s designed to make sure you get it right, and science evolves. Even scientists disagree with their colleagues on how to interpret the results or the study design or the statistical analyses that were done, and that doesn’t mean that science is inherently problematic. That’s all part of the process. Science is far from perfect because people are far from perfect.
Sure, there are personal biases that are in… that are injected in, and there are other biases that are injected in everything we do. But, you know, which statistical method you use versus, you know, who was in your cohort and how that was designed and what your time series was, how long you studied. Oh, did you only study PFAS concentrations during a drought in surface waters? Well, you don’t have the full picture. Did you only study it during a glut of rain? Well, you don’t have the full picture, right?
So, I read a lot of Dan Sarewitz’s stuff. I’m a huge Sarewitz fan boy, and he worked with me on that original article, Science for Hyper-Partisan Times, and that’s now the title of one of the courses I teach here at Carolina. But, you know, science is still the best game in town to help answer some of these questions, and Dan and his piece, Saving Science, pointed out that there’s this, this trans-science that Alvin Weinberg talked about in the ’70s, that there are just some questions science can’t answer. Or it can answer for some but not for others because there are some of these philosophical challenges and religious challenges and societal challenges in acceptance of certain science.
There’s certain people that don’t wanna get a vaccine just ’cause they don’t wanna get a vaccine, regardless what the science says. That’s their decision, right? And it gets complicated in the public health space or you could put 100 scientists in a room and say, “When does life begin?” And you’re gonna get 100 different viewpoints and, and some people say it’s not even a scientific question to answer because it’s ensconced in my religion, my religious dogma, you know? So I think that the solution to all of this is just personalizing it and localizing it.
I think one reason the Collaboratory has been so successful, and we’ve had some inquiries at the federal level about how can we make this, you know, a federal model? I’m like, “You can’t.” This is a state level model. It would be different for every state if it was designed from the ground up because every state has a different legal structure, every state has a different academic structure and different legislative structure, constitutional structure. The concept can still be the same, but I think when you break it down and say, “What are the issues that our people are facing and how can we help?” That really de-politicizes it. And all these issues people will agree on. Everybody wants clean water. Everybody wants to take care of children, so foster care, right? You know, you’re not gonna lose in that space if you go in and design research around that.
But it’s just how you get to the solutions, that’s where it becomes political. But if you’ve got the right partners in foster care, for example, well, don’t just design the study in a vacuum. Go talk to the DSS directors in our 100 counties and say, “What are your challenges?” And we’ve heard that their challenges are recruitment and retention of foster families. Okay, that’s a quantifiable nugget that we can work on together. How do we boost recruitment and retention? There are so many other variables in the foster space that are challenging and alarming and heart-wrenching. We need to solve them all, but at least, you know, you could take ’em a, a bite at a time.
So I think localizing it, having the right people at the table, and involving the researchers in conversations not only with the government entities, whether that’s the legislature or the county health board or the governor’s office or the state environmental regulatory agency, and answering those questions. And then the academics actually see they’re giving back to the state and they’re making a difference.
And I’ll end on the… I’ll wax poetic on the fire station project we’ve been doing. We’ve got a mandate from the legislature to take back all unwanted firefighting foam. And so AFFF, aqueous film forming foam, they all contain PFAS. So the PFAS is the film-forming part of the foam, and there are a lot of fire stations that don’t want it anymore. A lot of fire stations in the ’60s and ’70s took it for free because it was on surplus from the federal government, and so they got barrels of this, sometimes hundreds of gallons. So we, uh, we’ve identified somewhere between 65,000, 75,000 gallons that we’re in the process of picking up, and we’re sending it off to be destroyed. We’re not sending it off to be landfilled. We’ve actually employed companies to break it down into its elemental form, and that’s not cheap, but it’s the responsible thing to do. So that’s a solution. So we’re taking PFAS out of the environment. We’re picking it up out of these areas. But then we’ve got some other amazing opportunities to ask questions.
Okay, let’s sample all of these drums of AFFF. So now we’ve got the PFAS signatures in a library, and we tie it back to the manufacturer. Although some of these containers have no labels on them, so we’ve gotta try and forensically figure out what it was. Also in the process, we’ve started the firefighting cancer cohort. So we’re looking at PFAS exposure with our firefighters. Our cohort is now approaching 1,000 people. But one thing we found out is we asked the question of, hey, if these rural fire stations that don’t have any water infrastructure that are on well and septic, we should probably sample their wells and make sure their wells are clean because AFFF is so concentrated and PFAS are so persistent and that’s why they’re forever chemicals. So make sure we don’t have any issues. And so we had… I wanna say the number is 492 rural fire stations on wells that we sampled last year. Um, and we’re now wrapping all this up, but some of the early data… you know, let’s put this in context.
The EPA maximum contamination level, the MCLs that are coming out for PFOS and PFOA are four parts per trillion, four nanograms per milliliter. We have one well in Wake County, which is our capital county. Raleigh is in Wake County in the center part of the state. It’s some PFAS. So I’m not gonna say total PFAS because it was a targeted analysis, and I think we looked at 64 compounds in our targets. The sum, S-U-M, the sum PFAS concentration is almost 21,000 parts per trillion. I’d have to go back, and I remember the PFOS and the PFOA were, like, alarmingly high in the thousands, right?
Lisa Margonelli: Right.
Jeff Warren: So you’ve got firefighters drinking this, cooking with it, washing their gear in it, showering in it, filling their trucks with it. So a typical research program, if they even notified the fire station of the results after they were published, that’s where it would end.
But we haven’t published these yet, but we still notified the fire departments, the elected officials, the county health directors, and then we offered solutions. So for the six… Well, the 16 hottest ones that were all over 1,000 parts per trillion, some PFAS, we rolled tanked water within 24 hours, and we could do so because we’re exempt from purchasing protocol. We didn’t have to go out for an RFP and do a low bid after 90 days, right? We’ve got a problem. They need alternate water supply yesterday. Let’s roll the tank. We’ll figure out to pay for it later. And so we’ve got 14 tanks of water out there right now servicing fire stations, and then we’re putting in… One of those tanks is being pulled because we now got the filtration device up and operational at the first fire department we found. And then we’ve got the cancer cohort that are looking at their blood levels, and we’re seeing trends never before seen in the world in what’s causal and what correlates between water well exposure and firefighters, and I’m not gonna scoop the research team on that, but it’s alarming.
You know, I think that extra step of the way when you get there, it’s not just report of the day. It’s saying, “Okay, now we’re gonna help you with our experts, and we’re gonna give you tanked water, then we’re gonna come a longer term solution.” And so it’s, it’s all that dialogue that is probably one, at least in the short term, one of our greatest success stories is it just didn’t end at reporting results.
Lisa Margonelli: That is a really interesting answer about it being very local, and it doesn’t just end with collecting the results. I mean, it really was about dealing with the problem and seeing them as people and as part of the community.
Jeff Warren: Absolutely. I mean, first responders protect us. Who protects first responders? Well, science does, you know? And as part of our scientific investigation, we stumbled on a problem, and then we’re helping fix it like no other government agency can do it, which is, you know, sad and frustrating, but also we’re honored to be in that role to help folks.
It’s in our tagline, right? Our tagline is science period, policy period, solutions period. The science is great. The policy is great. I think the most impactful thing we do is the solutions.
Lisa Margonelli: To learn more about the North Carolina Collaboratory, read Jeffrey Warren and Blair Rhodes’ piece in our winter 2026 issue called Research That Solves North Carolina’s Problems. You can also visit their website at collaboratory.unc.edu. Find links to this and more by visiting our show notes.
Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts and write to us at podcast@issues.org. Thanks to our podcast producer, Kimberly Quach, and our podcast technical director, Roddy Nikpour. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor-in-chief at Issues. Thank you for listening