Conference: Creating Capacity and Connections to Expand Research Support Across the Northern Plains

This goal of this project is to build research support capacity across the five-state Northern Plains region (Dakotas, Nebraska, Montana, and Wyoming) by bringing together research support professionals for an in-person convening focused on enhancing the practices, processes, and workforce of the region’s research enterprise. Like the project leadership team, project participants will represent diverse roles and types of institutions of higher education, including research-intensive, emerging research, primarily undergraduate, and tribal colleges and universities. The institutions and research support personnel who will participate in this project are committed to catalyzing regional transformation to overcome the challenges of staff recruitment, heavy workloads, and access to professional development opportunities. The Northern Plains convening will create space for participants to develop a shared vision, consider possible strategies to address common challenges, identify how strengths can be emulated or shared, and will provide the opportunity to chart a course for future collaboration that includes shifting mindsets away from serving individual institutional needs to supporting the regional research enterprise. The impact of the project will be realized through increased cooperation and resource sharing that will foster connection and mentorship between Northern Plains research support professionals. This will, in turn, promote relationship building between institutions and faculty and increase collaborative research activity across the region. 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.