Launching a Cross Institutional Research Symposium

Jordan Nabers, Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, and Audrey DeLeon, Program Director in the Division of Research, Innovation, Collaboration, and Entrepreneurship (RICE), joined InfoReady’s Carlos Moncada in a Peer Spotlight webinar to explain how they used InfoReady for two distinct purposes: 1) to successfully launch a new research symposium to bring together researchers across the Health Sciences schools and university, and 2) as a centralized platform to manage and promote funding opportunities.

Initiative to create new multi-school event

Late in 2023, leaders of the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) and Texas Tech University (TTU) wanted to pilot a joint research day for all students, trainees, and faculty. The event - Amarillo Research Symposium - would bring together researchers from the TTUHSC Schools of Medicine, Nursing, Health Professions, and Pharmacy, along with the TTU School of Veterinary Medicine, into a day-long event with poster and oral presentations. “The goal was to create one research-centered event for the Amarillo campus rather than having each school conduct its own”, said Audrey.

In the past, each school handled their research day differently. “When we asked how many participated in each school and added them up, it was about 250 or more students in their school events,” Audrey explained. “Then we also recognized that within HSC, there was no formal research event yet for [the Colleges of] Nursing or Health Professions. We really wanted to include those students and give them experience with the process of doing a research symposium.”

“The big need we identified would be to collect a high volume of abstracts that we can have reviewed quickly in a centralized location for faculty reviewers, which in our case, they had one week to complete their reviews,” said Audrey. They chose InfoReady to help.

InfoReady was already on campus

Interestingly, the Amarillo Research Symposium was not the original reason why TTUHSC adopted InfoReady. A year earlier, TTUHSC Office of Research and Innovation and the Office of Institutional Advancement collaborated to adopt InfoReady to manage and promote funding opportunities. Additionally, InfoReady served as the repository and archive of private funding opportunities (corporate and foundation grants), including limited submission opportunities, along with a way to efficiently communicate their existence to faculty and staff in a centralized manner.

“There are so many different funding opportunities for all sorts of funders, so collecting them in one place has been really important from day one,” said Jordan. “We're focused on building this repository [in InfoReady] so faculty can go to our site as a resource, a reliable resource.” Jordan continued, “We have it embedded on our research website, but we're beginning to regularly share this page with our faculty through our research council, through our newsletters, their quarterly newsletter, and email blasts. We hope to continue sharing InfoReady and socializing it internally as a tool for funding and a major resource for our faculty, staff, and students.”

Running a successful event with the help of InfoReady

Audrey explains how InfoReady helped her and the team manage the processes to create their first cross-institutional research symposium. “We began planning and creating the opportunity process in January of this year, and the event was in mid-April. Our admin committee got together to determine a timeline and the steps that we would need to take within InfoReady. I oversaw the whole process as a super admin within InfoReady. We also had one person from each school as a co-admin so that they were able to access the entire opportunity, but we could oversee the process.”

Create applications to collect useful information

• “One of the big things we added to the submission form that really helped was to have students select their school and other things like, faculty advisor, category of their presentation, and even ‘their availability that day of the symposium’ so that we could easily put them into different groups.”

Collect abstract submissions

• “Our first step was collecting abstract submissions to see who was interested in participating and scoring those through the review process. Behind the scenes, the administrative committee compiled the data that was collected from these submissions in InfoReady.”

Simple routing for quick review and scoring by faculty

• “We had our co-admins from each school identify faculty members that they wanted to review the abstracts. We had two reviewers for each abstract, specific to the student’s school. The larger schools had more reviewers, but I am the one that assigned the reviewers in InfoReady. Then once it was scored and accepted with a high enough score, then we would put it into award mode in InfoReady, meaning that they were invited to present.”

Central system for presentation materials

• “Once we were ready, we used InfoReady’s Progress Report feature for the students to upload their posters for printing. I scheduled automatic reminders to have the students to upload their poster in InfoReady by our deadline. Our admin who managed the printing of the posters downloaded the PDF files directly from InfoReady.”

Easy to communication with all involved

• “Each school promoted the opportunity within their own communication channels to their students and trainees using the same opportunity link from InfoReady. We had our contact emails listed for questions and assistance, so they knew right away who to contact. InfoReady was a great way that we could communicate with a large group of participants at once.”

Outcomes/Results

“Our event success was achieved with InfoReady because this is how we selected our participants,” Audrey shared. “On the day of, we had 113 presenters, and over 300 attendees to the actual event.” Read the highlights of the event on TTUHSC news site.

Now, Audrey and Jordan are using InfoReady in more ways, like a launching a cross-institutional seed grant for their One Health Institute. They are also sharing with other faculty and staff how they can use InfoReady to improve their processes.