Findings from GRANTED Southwest Research and Innovation Conference

all right well welcome can you see my screen Selena I can looks good thank you welcome thank you for joining us today for this presentation following up from our Southwest research and Innovation conference that was held here in New Mexico in Albuquerque in February of this year um today what we're going to be doing is just going through what the conference looked like how we collected some data and insights from the folks who attended and then we'll share some of the outcomes of the conference that we found and then after that if anyone has any questions or feedback we'd be happy to open it up for conversation my name is Dr Hannah Torres I direct The Faculty research development office here at the University of Mexico and Selena canel who's joining me is with the New Mexico epcore program so thank you Selena for helping to put this webinar together and Selena is also a co-i on this grant I also want to start by thanking our organizing committee members and facilitators for the conference who are listed here all of these folks were a huge help in ensuring that the conference was a success and making sure that we were able to collect some really worthwhile information from people who attended and they really helped to make this an engaging experience for everyone so thanks to our committee members and facilitators the reason we decided to hold this conference is for a number of reasons but some of the context is that we noticed solicitations for Grants were encouraging a lot more collaboration in general across the board and we also saw proposal requirements becoming increasingly complex and the question was coming up about how could we assure all institutions have a role in research and Innovation not just the big r1s but thinking about emerging research institutions and creating a really inclusive and accessible research environment and we already realize that there's an underresourced research Administration and resour research development Workforce and saw the need for new approaches so the conference aimed to bring together people from research Administration and research development careers across the Southwest United States and we were Guided by the following questions we wanted to know what barriers gaps needs and challenges need to be addressed within the research Enterprise in the southwest to support building research Innovation capacity at local institutions we also asked how do stakeholders across the research Enterprise define success for enhancing research and Innovation capacity we didn't want to assume that everybody was looking at research success in the same ways especially since we were engaging with emerging research institutions with uh much higher teaching loads and uh focus on other activities including Community engagement and a lot of classroom activities and we also asked what future steps need to be taken to improve our ability to work collaboratively across all types of institutions in the southwest to address our challenges and increase our likelihood of success we had about 59 people attend the conference from 33 separate organizations or institutions and this just shows a breakdown of where geographically the individuals and organizations um represented came from so we did have a lot of participation especially from New Mexico and Texas but we also had participation from Colorado and Arizona at the conference and this included organizations and institutions such as Institutes of higher ed but we also had representation from National Labs and some other research organizations and these are actually the institutions that participated so you can get an idea of who was at the table for the conference the way that the conference was formatted was uh there were workshops that we held for educational purposes so these were primarily to provide content to the participants so that people could have concrete takeaways of skills or information that would help them in their research Administration or research development careers we also had a number of panel sessions that were related to the different listening sessions that are listed below the panels were groups of diverse experts sharing their perspectives on gaps envisioning the future and priorities and next steps and then following each panel we had listening sessions where people were able to have open discussion and answer questions and have conversations around what they saw as the gaps and barriers or challenges to research Innovation and collaboration in the southwest we also had a listening session around envisioning the future what we would want research success to look like in the southwest and then we had a listening session about priorities and next steps what could we do to get towards that future we envision in the final session of the con conference we had a culminating Round Table where people were asked to brainstorm some concrete recommendations that they would make to NSF to start addressing some of the gaps and needs and really leveraging our priorities and next steps and what I will be showing you today is primarily data that was gathered from those listening sessions and the culminating roundt session based on all of that information that we collected one of the first themes that was identified was related to faculty in the research Enterprise some of the things that people discussed were the lack of support and resources for faculty who are already feeling overstretched and spread pretty thin with balancing teaching service and research and we also saw people discussing the need for more faculty interested in research so focusing on recruitment of new faculty who really wanted to pursue research as a key interest there was also conversation around the accessibility of existing resources and services and even just building awareness for people about existing resources and services that they might already have access to one of the things that I wanted to point out here as well was there was discussion about sort of a misalignment about the communication that faculty received about needing to prioritize research and really wanting to leverage their research activities while not really having capacity opened up in other areas of their career to be able to conduct that kind of research so here on the right hand side of the screen there are a couple of exemplary quotes to support these themes and the full report shares more of these kinds of quotes um and just to read one of them our faculty would be to feel supported in their research efforts rather than stressed about how those efforts May hinder their other responsibilities that's an example of a quote that came from one of our listening sessions the second theme that was identified was related to research Administration and research development staff and three of the things that really came out in the listening group conversations were first the lack of Staff when people are posting positions for research Administration or research development roles it's really difficult to get a really St strong pool of qualified candidates and when people do have positions filled there's a high rate of turnover in these roles a third need that arose from the conversations about research Administration and research development staff was the need for more training and development both for staff who are working in these positions but also for faculty and one of terms that emerged in these conversations frequently was that ra Literacy for faculty and staff and so thinking about ways to increase and enhance that our literacy uh and again just one examplar quote frequent changes in staff and administration leave institutions without the institutional knowledge to succeed so once people do really start to succeed in these roles and become embedded in the university and really successful once they retire or move on to another role they take a lot of that institutional knowledge with them so one of the things we're seeing is the need to figure out how to embed that institutional knowledge more systematically based on that session um or based on those findings there were some key recommendations that emerged for NSF and these included things like providing funding for professional development helping offices provide Outreach for research administrators and research development as a career options and thinking about what skill sets are needed and what are the career ladders and that's actually closely related to our webinar coming up next week from Thomas Spencer which we'll share a bit more about in a moment um but another recommendation that came up was that NSF could build in research development or research Administration support into Awards or fund internships within research development or Administration offices an interesting suggestion that came up was to fun Remote Management training and team building and embrace the idea that a lot of these types of careers are really taking on a much more remote nature um there are many more opportunities and there's much higher demand for remote work in these kinds of positions so just leaning into that and figuring out how to be most successful when you're doing research Administration and research development remotely and managing offices remotely as well there were also ideas for staff exchanges among institutions and perhaps an a research development fellows program within NSF the third theme that we identified in the conference was related to collaboration and resour resource sharing we found that people were looking for more formal structures for networking and cooperation across the research Enterprise there are some institutions like nup the National Organization for research development professionals and en Cura which is more related to research Administration but if there were other formal structures that were even more accessible to a wider range of research administrators and research development professionals it would benefit a lot of people who are in this field just by building that community of practice we also saw people talking about the need for improved external collaborative structures and ways that people could more effectively work outside of their academic institutions and build cross-disciplinary and cross sectoral Partnerships to support research which relates to that third point and finally people discussed the the need or the potential benefits for a centralized repository for resources and documents which would be especially valuable for underresourced institutions that don't necessarily have the capacity to build out their own customized repositories with resources and documents that support grantsmanship and proposal development some specific recommendations that emerged related to these topics included Regional support for smaller institutions um and that could include admin support for smaller offices another idea was to establish a region establish Regional communities of practice for research Administration and research development professionals and create a regional organization that would support institutions with training and templates and examples NSF could also potentially fund a regional research Administration or research development affinity group and I should note that some of these ideas could potentially be funded through the NSF granted program the fourth theme of the conference that emerged was about University Research leadership awareness and support of research Administration and research development fields and the nuances of what happens within those fields people mentioned that it would be really helpful if University leadership had more nuanced understanding of RA and RD disciplines including their intricacies and how to align resources and services to best support the research Enterprise and this includes not only ra and RD offices but also human resources and fiscal offices and figuring out how to make the collaboration and coordination more seamless between offices that tend to be more siloed in nature the group also emphasized the importance and uh credibility of research Administration and research development staff and communicating that importance and credibility to University leadership ensuring that that was understood and acknowledged and then there was also conversation about the misalignment between leaders messages to engage in research without the adequate resources and support for faculty success and this relates back to that first theme that I was talking about where faculty are often already overstretched they're being encouraged to participate more in research but aren't seeing that Capacity open up in other areas to enable that deeper engagement in research some recommendations that emerged related to this final theme was that NSF could host a provos session with senior research officers at universities on the importance of research development and research Administration potentially with college presidents a marketing campaign was also suggested for research Administration and research development jobs especially to really emphasize the value of these career Fields as unique career career options whereas a lot of the folks at the conference were discussing how mostly they came into these fields in a roundabout way and it wasn't necessarily the end goal because it was never framed as such another person recommended a National Academy study to give research administrators and research development professionals more credibility in terms of the value added to the research Enterprise some of the recommendations that we synthesized the opis and the researchers leading the Project based on these findings from the conference were um we grouped these into two different categories we have recommendations for institutional research Enterprise leadership and then on the next slide I'll show you some recommendations for NSF some of our recommendations for institutional research leadership are to invest in reducing faculty teaching loads and release time hiring more research productive faculty and staff training and development of existing staff as well as increasing research administrator and research development staff salaries to enhance retention some recommendations for granted and for NSF were three key actions that we identified the first was to utilize collaborative programs to incentivize intentional support for research Administration and research development activities for example there could be dedicated funding to support ra and RD activities especially at lesser resourced institutions for things like training and support especially on big collaborative grants that require a lot of this uh administrative support to be happening to actually put funding aside for those ra and RD activities next we suggested funding Regional ra and RD training centers to develop and disseminate work defining best practices and processes and here we also focused on lesser resourced institutions and again this is something that could potentially already be funded through a mechanism like granted and finally we suggested a pre and post award a study on pre and post awward admin loads on NSF grantees to understand the impact on emerging research institutions and to try and elucidate some solutions for that administrative load and so with that those are our key findings from the conference from February I do want to highlight that we have two upcoming sessions we'll open it up for questions in just a moment but next week on November 14th we're going to be having a session about research Administration job families and we're going to have some insights shared from tuft and the University of Texas Rio Grand and then the following week we're going to be hosting a Southwest research and Innovation idea pitch session where people are going to share some ideas that they have for future collaborations or um potential paths forward and it'll really be an open and engaging session where people can brainstorm and discuss ideas so we'd really encourage you to join us for one or both of those sessions if you're able to and thank you Selena for dropping the RSVP links into the chat so with that I'd love to open it up for any questions that people may have or if you attended the conference or have any other suggestions based on what I've shared we would love to hear them thank you and we're a pretty small group so we're happy to have people if you'd like to just speak up you could raise your hand like and unmute you but in addition you you're welcome to pop a question into the Q&A box and we can monit monitor it there as well okay Lisa I'm GNA allow you to talk let's see if this works okay you are unmuted you hear me uh just barely can you turn can you make it Luder okay there you are okay I just thought I'd say if anyone's able to tell us more about the the first webinar coming up I'm interested in hearing about that the family the job families what's meant by that sure I just stopped sharing my screen but I could um Selena the link that you put in the chat is that to the page that has more information as well or is that just the registration link I think it's just registration so let me pull I can I can pull that up let me do that piece thank you yes we do have a web page with some addition information on that let me post that in the chat so that will take you directly to the website that describes a little bit more about this webinar I can share my screen so you all can see it there'll be three speakers Thomas Spencer was one of the thought leaders for our granted conference and Christina and Zoya are collaborators of his and they will be presenting basically a paper I think that they've just had published around uh research Administration job families and they're looking at two different institutions T and uh UT Rio Grand Valley to look at some of the policies that are supporting their sort of research Administration career paths I think it's going to be a really excellent session thanks that's helpful any other questions from our audience or comments I do see there are a couple of people who attended the conference Anna how maybe you could talk about what you're going to do with this these recommendations like how do they get shared with NSF well I believe that this webinar will be up and posted and available for people to review but we do also have a written report with the full findings so this was just a summary and we are planning to share out that report once we finalize it with the conference attendees but we'll also be sharing that report with NSF directly to um give them our our outcomes and recommendations and that's why if anybody has any additional feedback that they would want integrated in there or things that you really think are particularly noteworthy then please do feel free to let us know my email address was on the final slide and I'm also including it oh I think that's just I don't think my chat will go to everyone but it's h Tores 8 at unm.edu so if anybody wants to follow up please do feel free oh and we have Lisa back again okay go ahead Lisa there's not a clamoring for other people um and I guess I don't I didn't mean to leave my picture out but anyway um I was thinking that um if institutions are looking at your bullet points it might help to make them aware I'm not sure how aware some people are at universities about how frequent it is to have someone who is devoting devoted specifically to development as opposed to combining the roles of RA and RD so it might be worth detailing that hiring more staff might include adding a missing Department um like development that's a great point and we do get into that in a bit more detail in the written report because we were trying not to lump together research Administration and research development as just one thing like as long as you have staff working on proposals and research you're good so we do try to separate those out a little bit more in the written report but I that's a really great point I appreciate that any other questions or comments or ideas all right well if not then we can go ahead and conclude for today um I do hope that we'll see you at our upcoming webinars and thank you so much for taking the time to join us today please feel free to follow up by email if you have any followup thoughts thanks for joing us and including us thank you twe I see twe is asking a question all right you should be able to unmute and talk go ahead oh I don't have a question sorry oh it's okay I didn't mean to click on that I'm so sorry but thank you for allowing me to join this thank you very much all right have a wonderful day thanks everyone