Managing differences among diverse institutions, maintaining fairness, and motivating faculty are some of the challenges of directing interinstitutional collaborative research, says Reza Khanbilvardi, director of the NOAA-CREST Center (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Cooperative Remote Sensing and Technology) at the City College of New York. When its new data archiving, mining, and processing station opens, the NOAA-CREST Center will become a center of excellence in remote sensing, one of a select few U.S. academic institutions receiving and processing data from all major federal government weather and environmental monitoring satellites. Academic Leader recently spoke with Khanbilvardi about how the center achieved its success.