The NORDP Fellow Award recognizes the long-term accomplishments of members who have made sustained contributions to NORDP and worked tirelessly to advance research development as a profession and/or as a field. Status as a NORDP Fellow is the highest professional distinction the organization may bestow on a member.
Who: Jennifer Lyon Gardner, Deputy Vice President for Research
Where: The University of Texas at Austin
Number of years in research development: 16
Length of NORDP membership: 11 years
What does leadership mean to you?
I think leadership means different things in different contexts. The way I operate as a leader in my role at UT Austin is really different from the way I’ve operated as a leader within NORDP. Within UT, I started out as an office of one and had to do all the things myself. This meant I had to be very strategic about my time management and prove that RD services could be of value to faculty in order to move toward my goal of establishing RD at an institutional level. Once we had a VPR in place who believed in this goal, I was able to build up a large team. But I never set out to be a supervisor of a large group of people. I don’t consider myself to be the greatest mentor, actually – it requires a degree of patience that I find challenging when I have a bunch of things I want to accomplish. But I’m extremely fortunate to have managers within my team who are incredible at providing that mentoring. This allows me to focus on leveraging my strengths to lead the team. I excel at setting a vision for my team. I’m good at advocating for what we need and working with top level administration to get things done and bridging the faculty-staff divide.
Within NORDP on the other hand, when I was on the Board I sensed there was a need for something else. Within the Board, everybody is a leader. Everybody can set a good vision. What I saw was a need for someone who could put their head down and get stuff done. I spent so much of my time at UT being the person who makes all the decisions and justifies the existence of RD, it was honestly refreshing to have a group of peers to work with on the NORDP Board who already understood the value of RD so we could just get down to business. I took on the operational role of Board Secretary, which meant I spent a lot of time checking things off lists, keeping things organized, and doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work that I don’t think the average NORDP member will ever tangibly be able to see. But I’m proud that this behind-the-scenes work made the Board’s job easier and freed up their time to be able to focus on the important stuff, the same way that RD officers support faculty so the faculty can really focus on the scholarly content of a proposal and do their best work. And by contributing to the efficiency of how the Board and our organization runs, that ultimately benefits NORDP members.
What has your journey within NORDP looked like so far?
I came into NORDP not knowing anyone or anything about the organization. When I first joined (in 2013), I followed the listserv passively for a while and then I put a question out there. The question was about starting a seed funding program to incentivize cross-department collaboration (one of those perennial questions that still comes up on the listserv to this day). When I asked the question, Susan Gomes wrote me back and offered to chat and she had so much great RD-specific advice that I still share with others today. That first early interaction showed me how amazingly helpful and collaborative the RD community is and how important it is to have colleagues at other institutions who you can be frank with and compare notes.
In 2015, Rachel Dresbeck encouraged me to run for the Board. And I did, but I wasn’t elected. But after putting myself out there, I was asked to co-chair the Conference Committee and I said yes. It was the first time I had ever chaired a conference; I’d never done something like that before. I had my first child in the middle of planning the conference, and going to that conference was the longest I had been away from my then-5-month-old daughter. But I felt like it was an important new kind of leadership experience for me to take on. In 2017, I was encouraged to run for the Board again, which I was really nervous about because I had done it once before and wasn’t chosen. But I decided to go for it, and this time I was elected. I had never served on a Board before, so it was a massive learning experience. It was Karen Fletcher (who was Board Secretary at the time) who took me under her wing and helped me find my voice and recognize what I could contribute. And so it means a lot to me to be named a NORDP Fellow in the same year as Karen because she has been one of my biggest supporters and aspirational peers within the field. I had my second child while I was serving on the NORDP Board. And that’s something I’ve really liked about NORDP – how accommodating it is. I’ve always been able to find ways to remain engaged even as I was growing my family. That’s something that I think is particularly cool about our organization.
After I completed my time on the Board, I focused on revamping NORDP’s Leadership Forum. I was particularly interested in the Leadership Forum because I’ve been on a really rapid leadership trajectory within my own career. I became an AVP when I was 34, and I wanted to find a way to show more people in the organization that taking on that kind of position is not just a matter of waiting it out for someone to retire; you don’t have to be in your late 40s or 50s to be in a leadership role. I was also interested in finding a way to keep people engaged with NORDP and providing resources across all career stages. We opened up the leadership forum from an invitation-only to an application-based process to make it more inclusive and allow people to nominate themselves rather than depending on someone else in the organization to name them, which I’m really proud of. I’ve also continued to be involved in other NORDP events like the 3-part RD talent acquisition, retention, and development panel held in 2022-2023.
Throughout your time in NORDP, which relationships stand out to you? What led you to take on leadership roles within the organization?
My pursuit of leadership roles within NORDP would only have happened with the encouragement of Rachel Dresbeck and Gretchen Kiser. Initially, I didn’t see myself as “Board material.” They saw it in me before I saw it in myself. Once I was on the Board, Karen Fletcher, Karen Eck, and Jeff Agnoli played a big role in supporting me as a new Board member and helping me feel reassured that I do belong on the Board and that I do have something unique to contribute.
Since being on the Board, I continue to get a lot of value out of the close relationships I’ve built with peers within the organization, people like Jill Jividen, Kim Patten, Faye Farmer, and Nathan Meier. These relationships are incredibly important; we compare notes about things that are going on in our institutions and support each other. Knowing that my peers in RD share some of the same frustrations that I do sometimes lets me know that I’m not just failing as an RD professional.
What initiatives are you most proud of from your time as a NORDP volunteer?
Revamping NORDP’s Leadership Forum is certainly an initiative I’m proud to have led. There are also a few other things I’ve been involved in since being on the Board that stand out to me. One is serving as a recurring panelist for the three-part series hosted by Susan Carter and Nathan Meier focused on ‘Exploring the Research Development Talent System’, in which we employed a systems-thinking approach to jumpstart a larger conversation among NORDP members around recruiting, developing, and retaining RD talent. We got a lot of positive feedback from members after that series that they found the conversation helpful.
Finally, as I was nearing the end of my term on the Board, I rebooted a then-dormant executive (internal/Board members only) committee, the Governance Committee. This was one of those behind-the-scenes things that you might only become aware of if the Bylaws get updated, or something procedural like that. But my committee members (including Karen Fletcher, Rachel, Faye, and Nathan mentioned above, as well as Etta Ward, Joanna Downer, and Paul Tuttle) and I had a deep collective trust in each other and were able to have some really frank conversations about organizational culture and things we knew we wanted to improve about the culture. Back then, we’d sometimes really struggle to get a full slate of candidates for Board elections each year. In more recent years, through both the GC’s early work and also the Nominating Committee’s sustained efforts, NORDP has benefitted from a huge wave of incredible Board members who bring such a wide and impressive set of competencies to the role. If representation on your Board matters to you, I highly encourage you to consider serving on the Nominating Committee!
How has your involvement in NORDP impacted your career in research development?
My involvement in NORDP has undoubtedly had a positive impact on my career in research development as I’ve worked my way up from being a staff member providing RD support for a research center at UT Austin to where I am now. And one thing that has dawned on me more recently is that as I’m in the organization longer and longer, my role within NORDP is changing: it’s not so much anymore about what new knowledge NORDP can provide to me, or how NORDP is developing me as a person, but it’s more about how I can use my position and visibility within the organization and my position as a leader to bring others up. One personal goal I’ve set for myself going forward is that, at every conference, I want to do a presentation with a person I’ve not interacted with previously as a means to get to know them and give them greater visibility. So if you’re a NORDP member reading this and you want to hop on a collab for the 2025 conference, write to me!
What are you most excited about when you think about the future of research development as a field?
What excites me most about the future of RD is its growing visibility and recognition as a legitimate profession and field. The field of Research Development is explicitly referenced in federal agency documents now! On a more personal note, whenever we hire a new dean or leader at UT and I introduce myself as “leading Research Development for the institution,” they now typically respond with, “That’s great! At my previous institution we had someone like you and they were so valuable!” More and more organizations are choosing to invest in RD as a strategic asset, and that means more career opportunities for all of us in the field. To be clear, all of us in NORDP should feel proud of this and take credit for elevating the legitimacy and profile of our field and profession.
NORDP News 