What’s Possible When a State Invests in Science-Informed Policymaking

The model that Jeffrey Warren and Blair Ellis Rhoades describe in “Research That Solves North Carolina’s Problems” (Issues, Winter 2026) represents one of the most compelling examples in the country of how states can organize scientific expertise to address public challenges. North Carolina has built something remarkable in the North Carolina Collaboratory. The institution not only funds research but also integrates it into policymaking in ways that are collaborative, participatory, and responsive to real state needs.

Several aspects of the Collaboratory stand out as particularly strong. First is the scale and consistency of funding secured through the state budget, enabling deep, focused work on urgent issues such as PFAS contamination in drinking water. Second is the way the program engages multiple universities across the state, creating a networked research ecosystem rather than concentrating resources within a single institution. Third, its emphasis on use-inspired research, designed in collaboration with policymakers and communities, ensures that scientific inquiry is directly connected to real-world problems.

The Collaboratory also offers an important model for sustaining innovation. By reinvesting revenue generated from intellectual property back into research benefiting the state, it creates a virtuous cycle between discovery, economic development, and public problem-solving. Perhaps most important, it creates a pathway for scientists to engage meaningfully in public policy while remaining active in their research careers.

As someone who helped found the Missouri Science & Technology (MOST) Policy Initiative and now coleads the S&T Impact Advisory Group, which supports the growth of state science advising across the country, I view North Carolina’s success with admiration, but also with curiosity about the enabling conditions that made it possible.

Not every state currently has the budgetary flexibility or legislative culture that allowed North Carolina to establish and sustain the Collaboratory. Reading the article, I repeatedly found myself wondering how the champions within the legislature were cultivated and how trust between policymakers and the scientific community was built over time. These cultural and political foundations may be just as important as the funding itself.

Science and technology policy fellowship programs often play a key role in developing that trust. Fellows embedded in legislatures help policymakers see firsthand how scientific expertise can inform decisionmaking. Over time, these relationships can foster the kind of buy-in that makes larger initiatives possible. We are already seeing this dynamic emerge in places such as West Virginia, where several years of legislative fellows and strong leadership—including a Speaker of the House of Delegates with a PhD—have helped inspire legislation to establish a Collaboratory-like model.

North Carolina demonstrates what is possible when a state invests deeply in science-informed policymaking. The next challenge is determining how other states, especially those with fewer resources, can begin building toward similar systems. What are the core enabling conditions? What smaller pilot efforts might serve as stepping stones?

If the goal is a future where every state can connect research capacity with public problem-solving, North Carolina’s example provides both inspiration and an invitation: not simply to replicate the model, but to explore the pathways that make it achievable elsewhere.

Rachel K. Owen

As chancellor of Fayetteville State University, one of 17 institutions in the University of North Carolina system, I would like to enthusiastically affirm the findings reported by Jeffrey Warren and Blair Ellis Rhoades. They note the success of North Carolina’s unique model of directing public funding to solve state challenges through leveraging university research—working with private-sector partners to take research from the university lab to field implementation.

The vehicle used to accomplish this innovative and targeted research is the North Carolina Collaboratory, established by the NC General Assembly in 2016 to draw upon the research expertise present in the state university system “for practical use by state and local government.”

As the authors note, one of the original focus areas of the NC Collaboratory was the challenge of reducing PFAS concentrations in local drinking water. This included Fayetteville State University as well. Our faculty members developed a low-cost test kit able to detect the presence of PFAS at the extremely low concentration levels deemed to be potentially harmful, offering a helpful tool to guide and prioritize future remediation efforts.

The impact of this innovative and intentional collaboration with the NC Collaboratory has extended much farther than PFAS. At FSU, the Collaboratory’s support has been instrumental in such diverse arenas as developing soybean strains that are resistant to certain insect pests, identifying opportunities to incorporate a broader range of transferrable skills in workforce training at major NC plants in the electric vehicle ecosystem, and creating prototype diagnostic test kits that can help improve access to detection of serious periodontal disease.

These few examples highlight the tremendous impact of the NC Collaboratory. But its work and investment in a university such as FSU goes beyond this article. Thanks to Jeff Warren’s commitment to working with smaller, regional institutions, like FSU, we are now better positioned to help solve the real-world challenges our broader communities face.

When I became FSU’s chancellor in 2021, no one would have mistaken us as an R1 or R2 high-intensity research institution, especially when our annual grant awards for sponsored research and programs peaked at a mere $15 million that year. Like me, Warren still believed that much more was possible at FSU.

Building upon the visionary and intentional leadership of the NC Collaboratory, I am proud to report that at the mid-point of the current academic year, FSU has eclipsed over $45 million in sponsored research and programs. We also just announced our school’s first-ever federal appropriation for PFAS investment, transforming our ability to monitor contaminants and safeguard public health in the southeastern North Carolina region.

Undeniably, the NC Collaboratory represents an excellent model from which others can learn and build upon. Many thanks to the article’s authors, and for the work that the NC Collaboratory continues to drive.

Darrell T. Allison

It is inspiring to see the approach the NC Collaboratory is taking, pairing local research needs with state funding support. As Jeffrey Warren and Blair Ellis Rhoades note, the infrastructure of the Collaboratory extends well beyond that of a science-advisory fellowship model, which is limited in its scope. There is already significant creativity in the state-level science policy interface demonstrated by the Collaboratory, including the Washington State Academy of Sciences and other similar science academies that function much as the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine do at the national level.

Admittedly, much of the loudest discourse about science policy at the state level revolves around fellowship establishment. As a cofounder of the MOST Policy Initiative and supporter of other state-level fellowship programs, the fellowship model is naturally a central pillar of my approach. More broadly, the current dominance of the fellowship model is partly a reflection of available start-up funding. In an emerging field with limited investment, the stories we tell about what works elsewhere dictate which models gain traction.

At this moment in state science policy, we need to allow for divergent ideas, establish approaches that gain traction through dedicated local champions, and work toward sustainable funding. Reflecting this need, fellowships are not all designed the same way, started by the same type of founders, or interface with the state government through the same mechanism or host offices. This is intentional to ensure that programs reflect the needs of the states they serve. Programs such as MOST are pioneer species that prepare the soil of state government for other models of science policy.

As we build systems for connecting scientific knowledge to governmental decisionmakers, we need to center the people that will benefit and continue to design the programs and the funding mechanisms based on that support.

Finally, states that set out to fund efforts such as the Collaboratory of necessity must exercise significant trust-building between the scientists and elected officials. In North Carolina, which has a thriving biotech hub, I would assert that work such as that done by the Collaboratory is enabled by high awareness of the benefits of scientific research applications on everyday life. In many states, however, particularly those with fewer large research universities, there is less awareness and connection between science and everyday life (and political decisionmaking) and trust will need to be built prior to public investment.

In places that don’t have significant interactions between scientists and elected officials, fellowships are one tool to build this connection. There are many other ways as well. But we must be careful of one thing in particular: that as we work to build science advising and research funding mechanisms at the state level, we center the needs and uniqueness of the specific place involved. Proudly, I see this approach evident in the NC Collaboratory, in the MOST Policy Initiative, and in many other efforts working to establish relatively new state-level science policy operations.

Hallie Thompson