An early performance review for young Purdue mechanical engineering professor Jeff Rhoads boiled down to this: “Great in the classroom, not sure you’ve figured out the research thing yet.”
Rhoads has told that story on himself for years, a self-deprecating anecdote from a scholar who went on to succeed in the laboratory and become a leading administrator, first at Purdue and now as Notre Dame’s vice president for research. He figured it out.
Looking back, he reckons the issue wasn’t with the research itself, but with his communication of its importance. “I don’t think I was any better or worse than anyone else,” Rhoads says, “but I think it really comes down to storytelling and having tangible impact. To succeed, he came to realize, included the capacity to make a case for the work — to funders, fellow experts, the public, even himself. “Not just the ‘how’ and the ‘what’,” he says, “but the ‘why.’”
His own “why” came into focus when he started working to help the United States military identify and defuse roadside bombs that threatened American service members in Iraq and Afghanistan. That added moral weight to the intellectual curiosity that drew him to mechanical engineering. Up to that point, his work had challenged his mind but had not touched his heart.
“Making some little doodad that makes a cellphone better was interesting professionally,” Rhoads says, “but not personally fulfilling.”
Fulfillment now comes from facilitating research that aligns institutional expertise and resources with that motivating sense of mission. That’s a complicated process in the best of times — and these are not the best of times for academic research. Since the Trump administration took office in January, deep cuts to federal funding, and the foreboding prospect of more, have disrupted work at universities around the country, Notre Dame included.
Of the $218 million in external research awards the University received in the 2025 fiscal year, $96 million, or about 44 percent, came from federal sources. That’s down from the previous year’s $134 million, which made up more than half of Notre Dame’s external funding in fiscal 2024. The decline can be traced to a slowdown in new federal research awards and the termination of around $30 million in previously approved grants.
The reductions could extend beyond the direct grants that support research itself. Several federal agencies are seeking to cut funding that helps cover indirect expenses on facilities and administrative overhead. Universities negotiate those rates with the government every few years. Notre Dame’s most recent four-year agreement went into effect July 1, 2025, with reimbursement levels ranging from 26 to 58 percent depending on the category of indirect cost. Proposals to cap such reimbursements at 15 percent have so far been blocked in the courts, but another potential budget burden looms.
For Rhoads, the slowing spigot of federal research dollars carries an ominous long-term risk beyond the compromised projects in progress: damaged morale among young scholars. “Having a generation of grad students that don’t want to make their careers in research because they don’t like what they’re experiencing right now,” he says. “That’s what scares the hell out of me.
“Public trust in, quote, ‘experts’ and in research writ large has been decreasing for quite some time,” Rhoads continues. “Unfortunately, I think it’s decreasing at an accelerated rate right now. I’ll be honest, I think higher ed has a lot of blame for it — I don’t think we always do a good job of talking about how our work translates to the impact in [people’s] lives.”
Over the past two decades, the University has expanded its research portfolio — and trumpeted its impact, most notably in the Emmy-winning “What Would You Fight For?” series. Notre Dame created the executive position Rhoads now occupies in 2007 to coordinate and accelerate efforts across campus. In 2023, the inaugural vice president for research, Robert Bernhard, retired after 16 years in the position — just as the University ascended to membership in the Association of American Universities, an exclusive consortium of 69 leading U.S. research institutions, plus another two in Canada.
Acceptance to the AAU had been a longstanding goal, the selection affirming the growth and quality of research that had evolved under Bernhard.
The work includes efforts to treat disease and advance ethical technological progress, to combat poverty and secure peace, to stimulate economic development and improve education, to protect active-duty military and serve veterans, to promote democracy and fortify the global Catholic Church. Its scope extends to philosophy and theology, history and literature, arts and culture. Since 2000, Notre Dame has received more in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities than any other university.
“I always tell people, the research problems that are left in society today are the really hard problems — global hunger; global electrification; how do you solve AI and the ethical challenges around it and recognize dignity for the human being and what the future of the workforce looks like,” Rhoads says. “These are not problems that a single person, a single discipline or a single nation can solve alone. They require partnerships and collaboration.”
And money. There are those with the power of the purse on Capitol Hill who consider robust federal research funding essential to maintaining the nation’s global leadership. Indiana Senator Todd Young cowrote a Washington Post op-ed in March outlining why “sustained investment in fundamental and transformational science is consistent with the president’s stated vision of a new Golden Age.”
U.S. Representative Rudy Yakym ’19MBA, who represents the Indiana congressional district that includes Notre Dame, attended an August ribbon-cutting for the University’s new Wideband Test Facility. The microelectronics research lab, with funding from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, features specialized equipment to test ultrafast transistors and high-frequency antennae.
“A new wave of innovations is taking place right here on campus, with advanced engineering made possible by the advanced capabilities of the Wideband Test Facility,” Yakym said at the ceremony. “Such expertise will allow our country to stay on the leading edge of microelectronics development, now and in the future.”
Research that pushes the frontiers of science and technology has deep roots at Notre Dame. As a student in the 1880s, Albert Zahm created what’s believed to be the first wind tunnel in the U.S. to study the effects of lift and drag on different wing shapes. Those experiments sparked a pioneering career in aeronautics that included experimental glider launches from the roof of Science Hall, now the LaFortune Student Center. That legacy echoes in Notre Dame’s Large Mach 10 Quiet Wind Tunnel, the only facility of its kind in the world, that opened last year with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense to study hypersonic flight.
Other historic research triumphs include Professor Jerome Green orchestrating North America’s first long-distance wireless transmission in 1899. And Rev. Julius A. Nieuwland, CSC, who graduated from Notre Dame the year of Green’s successful transmission, went on to play a pathfinding role in the development of synthetic rubber in the 1920s. “There is no doubt in my mind — late 1800s, early 1900s — that we were one of, if not the preeminent research institution in the Midwest,” Rhoads says.
In today’s fast-changing world, he believes a college education is about instilling the transferable skill of “learning how to learn.” Not an either-or decision between classroom and lab, but both-and. “A trade-off between research and education, I think, is a false dichotomy,” he says. “Research, in my mind, is the purest form of experiential learning.”
Rhoads’ own background illustrates the central role of research in education — and the need for collaboration in any complex endeavor, which is central to his vision for discovery at Notre Dame.
Growing up in Charlotte, Michigan, a town of 9,000 about two hours northeast of South Bend, Rhoads’ manual labor supported the small business his parents owned. Sweeping floors and hauling lumber gave him “the hands of a 60-year-old — including an embedded piece of wood in one of them still.” A scholarship to Michigan State allowed him to become the first in his family to attend college. Engineering captivated him there, but so did pretty much everything else.
“If you were to go back and look at the college transcript, you can see what probably looks like a very confused young man,” Rhoads says. “Tons of classes in foreign policy and political science, and in history and philosophy and bioethics and music and you name it.”
Connections between superficially unrelated subjects came into focus, along with ambitions that only cooperation across those boundaries could make possible.
“That, made me appreciate both the partnership aspect, the need for interdisciplinary teams, but also that if you were not trying to solve some of the wicked, hard problems of society, that you’re wasting the precious time you’re given on this planet,” he says.
Before coming to Notre Dame in 2023, Rhoads spent four years as director of Purdue’s Herrick Labs — a position Bernhard also held before joining the University. At Purdue, Rhoads faced the challenge of maintaining the lab’s operations through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Does that experience compare to the current shock to the system? Not really, as far as he’s concerned, though he often hears the analogy. Unknowns clouded the early days of the pandemic, but Rhoads calls that a “bounded uncertainty” informed by the awareness that COVID tests and vaccines were in development.
When it comes to the federal retrenchment on research funding, the scrutiny of visas for international students, and the legal challenges to those changes. “It’s not always clear which way the pendulum is moving,” he says. “Certainly a lot of whiplash.”
Notre Dame’s approach to past crises, including the 2008 financial meltdown, offer current administrators lessons in taking the long view, rather than reacting to the moment. Leaders continue to divine the true north that guides them through many seasons of change.
As the only faith-based institution in the AAU, Notre Dame overcame what had been perceived as a barrier to entry. Then, a former president of an AAU school told Bernhard that, on the contrary, “your mission is your great gift” when it comes to research.
The University’s strategic framework released in 2023 provided a vision for the next decade, outlining multiple research initiatives: health and well-being; data and computational science; poverty; global Catholicism; democracy; ethics; sustainability; and the arts.
The complexity inherent in those areas brings Rhoads back to the importance of partnerships to develop solutions in the lab and deliver them to a world in need.
“I think the universities that survive both in the current environment and thrive in the future will be those that are the best team players out there,” Rhoads says. “They need to be business-friendly. They need to maintain their mission at the forefront of their actions. And they need to be willing to be an aggressive partner, by which I mean, they have to be willing to ebb and flow and have real relationships and be able to have an open dialogue with partners for the advancement of all of us.”
Jason Kelly is editor of this magazine.