When I was asked to serve as guest editor of this issue of Report on Research, I grimaced. I've worked in higher education for more than a decade, but primarily at a Midwestern university with a strong focus on general education. What could I say about the cutting-edge research and scholarship going on a doctoral/research university?

It turns out, plenty. This issue of Report on Research provided more than enough grist for the mental mill. For one thing, it offers a glimpse at the sheer breadth of research going on at this diverse institution. And in some cases, conducting that research takes real intestinal fortitude.

Consider for a moment Michael Mulcahy, an assistant professor of media arts. Mulcahy ventured into some of Arizona's toughest prisons to observe how new corrections officers interact with what many would call a throw-away population: inmates. Mulcahy first studied how new corrections officers were trained, then tracked four officers in their first nine months on the job. His results are both revealing and troubling.

Mulcahy isn't the only UA researcher studying a marginalized population. Researchers from the Southwest Institute for Research on Women are in the midst of two five-year projects that will look at issues like alcohol and drug abuse among poor women and children. The knowledge they gain will be the ray of hope that may one day change such destructive behaviors.

On another part of campus, the high-tech research going on in the Biomedical Engineering Program could lead to the manufacture of human tissue. The interdisciplinary program brings together some of the top minds in engineering and medicine to generate blood cells and build tissue Ð literally cell by cell. Amazingly, the machines these researchers are using were originally designed to build electronic circuits.

That's research from some pretty diverse disciplines. Yet nowhere on campus is the variety of research and scholarship more evident than at the University of Arizona Press. In existence since 1959, the UA Press has published more than 1,000 titles ranging from New York Times' best sellers to a dictionary of the Hopi language. Anthropologists and environmentalists have put their passions to paper. Books on the unique geography of the Southwest are numerous.

Director Christine Szuter puts the publishing in perspective when she speaks of the work of the Press. Yet she might just as well be speaking of the dozens of disciplines that day after day, year after year, make the University of Arizona one of the finest universities in the country.

"We ultimately form," says Szuter, "a core part of the intellectual foundation of a Research I institution."