Conference: Building Institutional Capacity for Engaged Research: A Workshop

This project seeks to identify ways to restructure the research enterprise to more routinely create rigorous, relevant knowledge that contributes to impactful and equitable societal outcomes. These ways include growing demand for engaged research: processes by which policymakers, researchers, community leaders, and others work together to identify evidence needs, bring together different kinds of knowledge and expertise, and use evidence to accomplish shared goals. To support this work, universities and the other institutions that are central to the research ecosystem must develop their capacity to support engaged research and other forms of policy- or societally-relevant scholarship. Momentum on these issues comes from all sectors of society. The federal government has prioritized open and impactful research through the Year of Evidence for Action and the Year of Open Science and related directives. Funders have recently launched or scaled up initiatives for supporting engaged research and mobilizing universities toward institutional change. In order to explore how institutions can advance engaged research and to provide a context for leaders of related initiatives to connect and better align their efforts, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine will convene a 1 1/2 day public workshop on building institutional capacity for engaged research and other forms of policy- or societally-impactful scholarship. Following the event, the National Academies will publish a report that summarizes discussions at the meeting. The workshop and report will anchor a follow-on set of activities to enact ideas that emerge during discussion. 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.