Earlier this year the Member Services Committee (MSC) organized a competition for established Regional and Affinity groups and recommended awards to a variety of groups. The intention of the competition was to assist groups with retention, recruitment, and engagement of members throughout NORDP.
The PUI Affinity Group’s project, Landscape of Research Development (RD) at Predominantly Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs), is using mixed-method data collection and analysis to examine the unique identity of RD staff at PUI’s. The initiative will fund a graduate student to analyze survey data collected in summer 2021 and provide incentives for focus groups in the Spring & Summer that will provide qualitative data to complement the survey. The ultimate plan is to prepare a white paper to be shared within NORDP and a draft manuscript for peer-review and outside distribution.
If you are interested in learning more about the PUI Affinity Group’s work please contact Kara Luckey at kluckey@seattleu.edu.
The Great Lakes Region received support for their annual retreat that was held in January. The event had 30 attendees from 17 organizations with the theme Wellness and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB). Attendees heard from a guest speaker, Denise Williams, Ph. D, who discussed How Trust Levels and “Thinking Traps” Influence Work Team Engagement and Effectiveness, followed by a group discussion on approaches to DEIB at the attendees’ institutions. In an effort to maintain longer-term member engagement the region has also created a book club and provided books to ten members (by random drawing). More details about the retreat can be found here.
If you are interested in getting involved with the Great Lakes regional group please contact Ellen Freeman at efreeman@umn.edu.
The Northeast Region’s initiative is planning to examine Justice-Equity-Diversity-Inclusion + Belonging (JEDI+B) related to RD units and DEI units. The group hopes to examine questions such as, “How can RD professionals be given RD-specific allyship training? Can we design a toolkit to be used at the institutional level to enable RD-DEI collaboration best practices intramurally? Can we build an inter-institutional regional strategy? How can we diversify the RD community itself?” NORDP-NE hopes to work with representatives from the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE) and other groups to adapt and modify a multi-institutional climate survey that will complement NORDP’s overall CIE survey. Ultimately the plan is to share the survey with NORDP-NE members and provide insights to the region and NORDP as a whole to help recruit, retain and engage members.
If you are interested in learning more about this initiative please contact Mariah Nobrega at m.nobrega@northeastern.edu.
Elizabeth Festa, co-chair of MSC, said, “We are excited by the innovative way in which these three groups have rooted their engagement efforts in research inquiry as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion. Their events and projects will contribute not only to advancing knowledge in the field of RD but to embodying the values of NORDP. “
Compiled by Daniel Campbell, Member Services Committee
a great deal of help preparing and submitting federal grants. It was then that I discovered untapped skills in grant writing as well as an affinity for this type of work. A position opened up at my institution’s central RD office about a year later and I was able to land the role based upon that experience. There, I worked primarily on large, infrastructure/capacity-building grants and led grant writing training workshops for early career faculty. I recently transitioned to a new role within the MUSC College of Nursing to help expand overall research funding for that college. I am now providing more one-on-one support to faculty with grant writing and strategy development, which I really enjoy.
and decided to apply to this position not knowing what Research Development meant. It was a pleasant surprise to realize that this fit my interests, goals and ambitions so well. We built our RD office from the ground up. We mostly work with individual investigators submitting to the NIH and other biomedical funding agencies, including state and private funding. We also work on large grants and deliver a lot of education.
Fortunately, my postdoc organization, the Medical College of Wisconsin, had a fantastic career seminar series for graduate students and postdocs. From there, I learned about research administration and development, and by talking to a number of people I already knew, I learned about NORDP. After learning even more about the field at my first NORDP meeting, I was confident about the type of job I could apply for and later that year started my career in research development.
NORDP News 