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Jenny Chao and Carly Cummings joined us for a Peer Spotlight webinar to discuss how they run growing research development programs with small teams.
Jenny Chao is a Research Program Development Specialist in the Office of Research at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. Her role includes managing internal grants, providing proposal development training and resources such as proposal faculty, proposal writing groups. She does limited submissions and is involved in research communications.
Carly Cummings is Senior Director of the Office of Research and Faculty Development at the University of Idaho. Carly joined the University of Idaho five years ago to launch the Office of Research and Faculty Development and has been instrumental in growing the University of Idaho research enterprise. Carly and her team develop and deploy resources and services to enhance the readiness of the University of Idaho faculty members to develop competitive grant proposals.
Describe your role and where your team fits into the office of research.
Carly: I report to the Associate Vice President for Research who reports to the VPR. So, we're very connected to the VPR and I think there's a dotted line probably between myself and the VPR. We are in a lot of communications together because he sees our office as a strategic partner in growing the research enterprise for the University of Idaho and figuring out how to do that very strategically.
Our office has experienced some growth, and we are now an office of six. We have me and two individuals that are the limited submission team and then we have three other proposal development specialists, with one more to come on in in about a month. While we’re not a small office anymore, we started from zero so we have experienced what it's to be that small office and then what it's to grow.
As far as the University of Idaho, we're an R2 research university and our research expenditures were about $116.5 million dollars last year.
Within InfoReady we run limited submissions, as well as internal funding programs. We also run a lot of our competitions for our faculty development cohorts. We have a proposal development academy and a leadership academy which admission is competitive, so we run everything through InfoReady. InfoReady is the program that solves all of our process management woes and problems.
Jenny: Lehigh University is also an R2 institution. Our research expenditures are lower at $40-45 million last year. We are aiming to double that over the next 8 to 10 years.
In terms of challenges, one is growing and being able to achieve that goal.
We have about 550 faculty. It’s a diverse range as not all of them are tenure track, but the majority are. We do have some teaching track, research track from our research development office. We probably engage with two to 300 of them on a more regular basis.
I report to the Director of Research Development who reports to the VPR. We have a very small team. The research development group is just me and the Director of Research Development.
We do a little bit of everything just because that’s what’s needed. Compliance, tech transfer, and sponsor programs all sit in one office of about 20-25 people.
In terms of what we use Info Ready for, we have a fairly robust internal grant program which distributes about $500,000 to 600,000 each year for different research initiatives. We manage that completely through InfoReady from application to review to award. And on top of that, we also share the InfoReady license with other departments at Lehigh who use it for student awards, undergraduate and graduate applications and awards, fellowships, travel grants and so forth.
What kind of challenges do small teams face when you're trying to manage all the aspects of research development?
Jenny: Just scaling up to the increasing demands that our university is seeing, that's the overall the bigger challenge.
We’re hoping to grow the size of my team so that should give us some relief. But right now, we would to offer more services that we're just not able to do because there’s only two of us.
For example, we want to bolster proposal writing support and development, but right now we're not able to offer as much one-on-one help on a very detailed level.
Instead, we offer peer group review so that there can be more people to share the effort and also the benefits.
I would say another one of the challenges that comes with being a small institution is that that we are starting to have to collect more and better outcome data which historically we didn't used to do because we didn't have very many limited submissions or faculty to keep track of. In the past, we would we go out and approach teams to apply.
As we're scaling up and more people need and want assistance with putting in a good grant, we're having to figure out how we can do more with what we have. So that's a tricky part and also how to measure that in a way that can capture what we're trying to do.
The InfoReady user base has been a great resource for the metrics and data collection we need.
Carly: I think similar to what Jenny mentioned, University of Idaho is looking to grow our research and expand our portfolio.
And so trying to figure out what that means for the University of Idaho and trying to find the right size programming, the right sort of culturally relevant funding opportunities that will give our faculty what they need. There's a lot of assessment and trying to understand what is needed on our campus.
I talk with a lot of my colleagues at other institutions about what they are doing and what's working for them, but the challenge is to try to figure out how to make that right size for the University of Idaho.
We need to know if we are getting the outcomes that we intend with the investments we're making. One of the things that we're looking at now is our limited submission process, because it runs through our office. We see an opportunity to engage in the limited submission process that isn't completely mechanical, launching things, awarding, and moving on.
I want to take advantage of the fact we’ve got a few years of data from InfoReady about where our faculty are competing and where they're not, but they should be to help us make a strategic march toward getting folks more engaged in applying for limited submission funding opportunities.
InfoReady has allowed us to have a good view of where we were not competing but also where we see great opportunities. We're taking advantage of having that information in our office to do some outreach kick-off meetings around certain limited submission funding opportunities to get interest, one-on-one conversations and so on.
With the limited submission process running through our office, we can improve some efforts to enhance our competitiveness going forward, which is sort of a new and exciting thing but is also going to be a challenge to figure out how to do it in a way that is right for us.
An initiative we are funding is helping faculty members whose proposals were declined but received pretty favorable reviews. A lot of institutions have this “operation resubmission success” initiative. This has been a really beneficial component for our faculty because we observed a lot of faculty put the effort to write a proposal. Then when it's declined and they just kind of sit on it “oh, ok, I guess I can't do that”.
We are working with and coaching faculty to resubmit, as this is sort of part of the process and then helping them evaluate what's in the reviews and if there are opportunities to apply for funding to address specific actionable items in the comments themselves.
This has been really well received program for us. They feel this it's Christmas for them. They had no idea there was actually some help in that way. But the challenge too is getting the word out.
Jenny: Carly, I can definitely echo your sentiments. One of the things that we would to do more of is kind of a postmortem because once you get your grant reviews, people just kind of let it drop. It was so much work and then nothing came of it.
In terms of research engagement with the faculty, we've done a number of things that have been successful, letting faculty know that we are here to support them and that we can help them figure out grant opportunities and with their proposal development.
Some of the things we've done in terms of outreach are visiting the colleges at the beginning of the year during their orientation. We ask to have a half hour at their orientation meeting for new faculty just to show our face, introduce ourselves and let them know we're here and what we do. That's actually been quite helpful, as people are starting to turn up at our events more often.
We also started putting out a monthly newsletter this year because we found that we were sending endless emails about, “oh, here's an opportunity, wait, oh, here's another opportunity”. We'd have a lot of emails going out and everyone's so busy with so many emails, we decided to try and condense that into one place.
So we created a once a month summary of here are the opportunities out there, both internal and external and some tidbits of news. It's become our research STEM newsletter.
We worked with our university communications office to create a look for it. They developed the template for us. Now it is a newsletter that we run through our server system that has everybody, all the faculty, all the staff on it.
It’s been great because as soon as we send out the e-mail, we can see registration rates jump because people are reminded to sign up.
This idea was definitely something I wanted to pass along because it was recommended to us. We've started doing it and really found that we have more connection and are sending fewer emails that are getting lost or make people getting frustrated with getting too many emails. For us that's worked really well.
I think one of the key things has been to share it with staff even though mostly focused on the faculty. But when the staff know about the opportunities, they also pass along that information when they talk to the faculty. So we've started sending this newsletter out to basically the university at large.
We keep expanding the audience to include more people who tell us they want to get the newsletter, so now pretty much everybody at the university gets it.
We run an NSF career proposal writing boot camp that's really well attended. The people who do the boot camp with us tend to have higher rates of success with funding, which is wonderful. We also make sure we get to know the junior faculty, the new faculty coming in to start right away talking about their early career plan.
Both of you described new initiatives to engage with faculty members in different types of ways and to raise the awareness of resources that are available. What type of data are you looking at to determine how to do these things?
Carly: The data part is very important, but also, one of the more challenging pieces is to get a real sense of what is the right data to be able to make those decisions.
Having just run limited submission for five years, I've got a knowledge of what programs I get excited about every year. When I see nothing coming in, no one's applying, we start reaching out to 2-3 individuals we know are closely matched with the opportunity, especially for the strengths of the University of Idaho.
Even though we send out a limited submission newsletter every week, folks might just not read it probably or just kind of skim through it. When we share it individually, that seems to get folks attention.
And the other thing I'll say that has worked to increase individuals’ interest in a limited submission program, and this wasn’t not initially intentional, is having them serve as a reviewer on an internal panel. That forces the individual to get to know the solicitation and the program, which is helpful since we chose them as reviewers because their research or interests are adjacent to whatever that that program is.
We've seen some of those reviewers come back as applicants for the competition the following year.
For limited submissions, targeting the messaging to those individuals that could be potential applicants by getting them on a panel or sharing them through InfoReady has been effective, although it’s very slow. You wish it could go faster.
What areas have you started targeting for faculty research based off of the data you've been looking at?
Jenny: In terms of limited submissions, I was nodding along to what Carly was saying because I can relate. It's this balance of one-on-one personal touch reaching out to people, but it's very time-consuming. But when you do a mass e-mail communication, people aren't looking at it or don't think it applies to them.
One of the thing we tried this summer was to get more of our humanities faculty to apply for the NIH summer stipend. It's a small one, but once you get it, you're much more competitive for a NIH grant later.
We looked through the data in our research organizational platform for past awardees and where people from a particular department have been pretty successful. Then we reached out to faculty to say “so and so from your department previously received this award, maybe you should consider it.” We offer support along the way too.
We are planning this summer to hold a panel of previous awardees to talk about what they did with the grant and their experience. Our model has been to have a peer panel to talk about their experience of getting the award, their challenges and successes to offer a little bit of insight into the program and encourage people to apply.
In terms of collecting outcomes, we're looking at the big picture, the number of grants being submitted and funding rates.
What kind of correlations are you drawing from people who were awarded internal funds and then either applying for extramural funding and being awarded extramural funding?
Jenny: Yeah, it's not a guarantee if they get the seed funding and then they definitely get the grant. But it's the hope though, that's always the hope is that we're building you up to be Rockstar researchers bringing tons of money in university.
We run a few different mechanisms. There are small grants of less than $10,000, mid-level of $30,000 to $60,000 and a bigger one that's about $100,000 for teams.
When we're awarding the grants, the review committee is looking at things like what's the history of collaborative success of this team, how have they worked together before, is the idea solid, is the budget sound, have they talked about the potential sort of applications that they could be putting out or where do they want to go with this project if they get the funding?
We do ask explicitly, though it's not a requirement, that they submit for external granting but mostly we want to know what's your long-term plan.
It generally correlates the proposals that are more well thought out with long term plans and a good team that makes a very strong, compelling case, that they tend to score higher on the reviews and are more likely to be awarded.
When we have faculty who are in the humanities or social sciences and we find anything that sounds like a really exciting, good idea, even if they have not already published on it, we take chances on people who have a great idea.
You develop the sense of that certain teams or individuals become more successful. The people who use the seed funding program and attend a lot of the trainings we offer tend to be very productive in terms of getting grants.
When they complete the grant, we do ask them to report on what they've published, how they've disseminated the information, any other sort of works they've produced beyond successful grant proposals. We're also looking at papers and talks and depending on what their field, say a book or something that.
A lot of people in higher ed recently have said that staffing limitations prevent us from doing as much as we want. How are all these trends impacting how you're growing your operations and choosing how and where to staff?
Carly: Yes, that's something I think about a lot and the pandemic obviously presented challenges for everyone. And now we're thinking about staffing in the context of perhaps having people working remotely or hybrid.
There are all these different models out there now, not just in research development obviously, but just across all sectors that sort of just changed how individuals worked, what their expectations of future workplace involvement would be.
For our team, we are 100% in person and that is in line with how the University of Idaho is working right now, for the most part.
There are some positions in our research administration arm that are remote because that's how that field has progressed. It has been a challenge overall to hire people for a while there, but it seems to have loosened up a little bit as far as at least getting applicants to apply.
I have to temper the different initiatives to roll out because they are 100% dependent on the staff that I have. When you get more staff, you can do a little bit more. There's that sort of flux that I'm trying to balance so that we're being as effective as possible with as lean of a team as possible too. But big ideas take more humans.
I have to gauge my annual or monthly goals based upon the number of staff that we have. It’s a challenge. I do realize that we can't do everything so I take a very focused approach on what our metrics and our goals will be based upon staff size.
