Conference: GRANTED Building a Regional Research Ecosystem among Emerging and Minority Serving Universities and Community Partners

This project, a series of convenings among emerging research universities and community partners in the Central region of the Commonwealth of Virginia, will develop, organize, and support efforts to build a regional research ecosystem. This regional collaborative effort will strengthen human capital assets and technology transfer and public-private research partnerships by working across the region to increase access to researchers, mentors, research administrators, and tech transfer specialists. The convenings will also assist in the development and sharing of common training and professional development opportunities. Previous collaborative efforts suggest that the following goals will have maximum impact on the research enterprise in the Central region of the Commonwealth of Virginia: 1) Increase knowledge of technology transfer and intellectual property protection; given the diversity of regional universities and partners, this also creates opportunities to explore the potential of technology transfer opportunities for social sciences and humanities research and how translation of research serves the non-profit and for-profit business sectors. 2) Building human capital, which includes the research administrative workforce, research leadership, and student research training and leadership. 3) Build public-private and community partnerships for research and translation; working to coordinate networks, projects, and resources. Primary participants in the project are Virginia State University, Norfolk State University, Longwood University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Activation Capital. The national professional organization, Teaching Institute for Excellence in STEM (TIES), is also a collaborator. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.