Conference: INTEGRaL: Innovation Network To Enhance and Grow ReseArch Infrastructure and Links

This project seeks to improve research administration and research development infrastructure to support more and better discoveries that will help society. Research administration and research development professionals help researchers navigate the complexity of grant submission and award management. Unfortunately, too few individuals are formally trained for these careers and too few institutions are adequately staffed to support the ambitions of their researchers. This is particularly true of institutions that have fewer resources and receive fewer federal research dollars. To meet these challenges, this project brings staff members from research institutions together to identify specific problems and propose scalable and generalizable solutions that provide sustainable support and diversify and broaden research activity. Enhancing the skills of research administration and development professionals allows investigators to focus on their research. Creating training programs and a better-defined career path for research administration and development professionals will grow access to research support infrastructure especially in underserved urban areas and rural communities where many colleges and universities are located. The Innovation Network To Enhance and Grow ReseArch Infrastructure and Links (INTEGRaL) will convene research institutions in Illinois and the surrounding region to address common challenges and explore potential solutions in research administration and research development and to consider how a cooperative approach could advance shared goals. Two overarching themes will frame the work of the project: 1) training and professionalization of the research administration and development workforce and 2) how institutions could scale this workforce to match their grant portfolios. Project participants will be recruited from multiple types and sizes of institutions of higher education and related organizations in Illinois and the surrounding region. The project will be conducted in three phases: (1) an electronic survey to identify the key specific topics to be addressed under the two main themes; (2) a one-and-a-half-day workshop to clearly define the problems and propose solutions based on the topics identified in the survey; (3) post-workshop follow-up sessions for further discussion of any topics as needed. The expected outcome of this project is a set of clearly defined problems and proposed solutions to address them. 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.