I've worked/consulted in the administration of academic research field for 30+ years. I don't have the AAU list committed to memory, but I'm actually surprised neither Utah and UCSC wasn't already an AAU member.

Academic research is a lot like college athletics. There are several factors driving research program reputation. Sponsored research dollars, research faculty quality, and facility/support quality are big ones (not unlike college athletics). And the impact of the research.

And biomedical research is the biggest driver of research dollars and research program reputation - and thus AAU membership. Without a large medical school, it is hard to recruit top biomedical researchers and generate biomedical research dollars - and thus raise money to build and outfit top-level biomedical research facilities. And so on.

UCSC and Utah have world-class biomedical researchers and facilities. National Academy of Science members are a proxy the quality of your best faculty. Like athletics, star faculty are critical. They bring in far more dollars than the average research faculty and write, by far, the highest impact papers.

Utah has 14 Nat'l Academy members (at least one who is a Nobel Prize in Medicine winner). UCSC has 11. VT, by comparison, has 3.

Virginia Tech has a very good engineering research program which generates substantial sponsored research dollars. But its nascent medical school and relatively small biomedical research program is almost certainly the biggest factor preventing AAU membership. In the academic research world - which is driven by biomedical research - Virginia Tech is not a name that gets mentioned a lot. Yet

[Post edited by marcbvtgm at 11/15/2019 10:31AM]