Expanding the NORDP Consultants Program to Sixteen Minority Serving Institutions

The NSF Growing Research Access for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity (GRANTED) Initiative seeks to support the development of the research support and service infrastructure to address the complexity of securing and managing external funding, particularly at emerging research and minority serving institutions (ERIs and MSIs). This project from the National Organization of Research Development Professional (NORDP) expands on prior successful efforts working with Historically Black Colleges and Universities and focuses on providing fundamental research development resources. Research development refers to strategic, catalytic, and capacity-building activities that advance research. This project tests how the diversity of the U.S. national research ecosystem can be enhanced by providing research development services to MSIs. In this project, the NORDP Consultants Program will extend support to 16 minority serving institutions across four new cohorts of four MSIs each. Each school will receive 600 hours of consulting time from experienced NORDP Consultants over two years and gain access to an array of other research development supports for the duration of the project period. The program will also promote network creation among the institutions selected, through cohort community building events and participation in an annual national conference. Formative and summative evaluation activities are included to assess the effectiveness of the approach. The project represents an innovative, novel, and potentially transformative model of how professional societies can work with ERIs and MSIs, to provide more equitable access to resources that will increase research capacity and competitiveness, ultimately strengthening the nation’s research enterprise. 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.