Going STRONG Together at CSUDH

Established in 1960, California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) is a comprehensive urban metropolitan university primarily serving the South Bay region of Los Angeles County. Nearly 53% of CSUDH students are considered low-income, and 47% are first-generation college students. The university’s research workforce reflects this broader campus composition, with faculty and staff bringing a wide range of personal and professional experiences and expertise reflective of the university’s surrounding community. With the full support of the CSUDH administration, substantial investments have been made to institutionalize and sustain NIH-funded initiatives to improve participation in biomedical research; consequently, CUSDH has grown its biomedical research environment to include $5.6 million in active NIH awards in the most recent fiscal year. Yet anecdotally, structural and other barriers to research participation – such as heavy faculty teaching loads, administrative challenges, and lack of support for student research assistants – nonetheless remain, limiting the ability of our research enterprise to effectively serve the surrounding populations and address the health outcomes that affect them. Through the conduct of a structured, comprehensive, and theoretically grounded needs assessment that is attentive to methodological rigor and transparency, we will systematically document our institution’s current strengths and challenges related to resources, research support systems and infrastructure, and how these factors play out across departments and among faculty members of differing backgrounds. Using a mixed-methods design, we will assess research capacity and barriers to research participation at CSUDH (Aim 1). The needs assessment will include a quantitative survey of CSUDH faculty and staff eligible to serve as Principal Investigators on extramural grants (~1100), followed by an in-depth qualitative substudy of 40 participants that utilizes a Life History Calendar approach (Caspi et al., 1996) to center the voices, work, and perspectives of our research community. We will use cutting-edge statistical techniques, including multilevel modeling techniques such as cross-classified random effects modeling (CCREM; Guo et al., 2024), that considers multiple dimensions of personal and organizational context in assessing population needs. Mixed-methods results will allow us to conduct a deep dive into complex effects that may be driving access to and perceptions of support for research at CSUDH. We will then use the results of these analyses to develop an action plan aligned with our campus strategic plan to increase our research capacity and activity by addressing contextual factors that hinder research participation (Aim 2). The resulting action plan will serve as a guide to enhance our institutional biomedical research capacity and foster an environment conducive to the conduct of high-quality, innovative biomedical and public health research.