Written by the Conference Committee Branding and Communications Working Group
NORDP has invited Dr. Marie Bernard, Rhonda Davis, and Dr. Travis York to deliver a keynote panel to kick-off the NORDP 2024 Conference on Monday, April 29, 2024. The structure of the panel will include opening remarks from each guest speaker outlining important diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Travis York, AAAS
“When I think about how to make meaningful change to increase access and opportunities for all people, research development professionals are well-positioned to build the capacity of institutions and organizations through thoughtful design.” — Travis York (AAAS)
Marie Bernard, NIH
“My role as the NIH Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity is to work across NIH, visioning at the 50,000-foot-level, to foster a diversity of perspectives in science.” — Marie Bernard (NIH)
Rhonda Davis, NSF
“I am excited to share how NSF thinks both about the research integrity space and about supporting researchers as they currently exist.” — Rhonda Davis (NSF)
All the speakers are looking forward to engaging with the NORDP audience. The keynote panel will feature a moderated discussion and include time for audience questions.
The invited panelists and the conference planning committee are so excited to share this conversation with #NORDP2024 attendees.
As an organization, one of our shared goals is to create an environment where every member can feel heard, respected, and valued. Late last year, a NORDP member notified the board of directors about an article posted by the Duke University Libraries outlining their decision to terminate the use of Basecamp as a project management platform.
The decision at Duke was prompted by Basecamp leadership’s blatant criticism of diversity, equity, inclusion, and racial justice efforts. The NORDP member who reached out encouraged board members to review the Duke Libraries’ stance through the lens of NORDP’s goal to “foster a culture of inclusive excellence by actively promoting and supporting diversity, inclusion and equity in all its forms to expand our worldview, enrich our work, and elevate our profession.”
Diversity, equity, inclusion, access, and belonging are cornerstones of our organization, and we took this call to action seriously. We began immediate discussions about Basecamp’s lack of inclusive culture and considered whether we wanted to continue to commit NORDP’s financial resources to a service provider that is not aligned with the organization’s central values.
Following careful consideration, we voted to discontinue the use of Basecamp as NORDP’s project management platform when the organization’s current contract for the tool expires on June 1, 2024. We encourage you to read the Duke University Libraries article, “Why We’re Dropping Basecamp,” which reinforces the importance of aligning our organizational investment in resources with our values.
We are in the process of selecting a new project management platform. If you have suggestions about alternatives, we welcome them. In the coming weeks, we will provide more information about the new platform we select as well as details and guidance about how we plan to shift NORDP’s work to the new platform while retaining the organization’s historical records. We appreciate your understanding and support during this period of change.
As always, we welcome your thoughts or suggestions. Please feel free to communicate directly with any member of the Board of Directors. Thank you for making NORDP the organization that it is and for raising concerns and challenging our professional community to do and be better.
For Dr. Brad Johnson, it was a crucial conversation with a valued mentor early in his career that offered him the affirmation that he needed to pursue his professional goals. Johnson, at the time, was a brand new clinical psychologist serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps. And despite the extensive training he had undertaken to become a practicing clinical psychologist, he was having some misgivings about his chosen profession. Johnson remembers working up the courage to share his thoughts with the senior psychologist who was serving as his supervisor and telling her, “You know, my happiest moment in the week is when a client cancels an appointment and I actually have time to do some writing. I love working on research articles and I love teaching, and I’m kind of thinking I don’t want to be a clinical psychologist in the traditional sense. I’d love to teach and be an academician.” His mentor’s response? As Johnson recalls, “She just looked at me and said, ‘Of course.’ like she’d known that all the time.” That pivotal conversation was a lightbulb moment for Johnson about the power of mentorship.
Dr. Johnson, now a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Leadership, Ethics and Law at the United States Naval Academy and a Faculty Associate in the Graduate School of Education at Johns Hopkins University, will be delivering the closing keynote at the 2023 NORDP conference. His address, entitled Mentors-of-the-Moment: Creating Mentoring-Rich Organizational Cultures,will focus on how to leverage developmental relationships and existing mentoring infrastructure to create cultures of mentoring within organizations.
When he began teaching and supervising students in a clinical psychology doctoral program, Johnson’s initial research focused on the treatment of depression. But that started to shift when one of the doctoral students he was supervising became interested in researching mentoring. “He came to me and he said, ‘You know, I found this article on mentoring in graduate training, and I find it really interesting and I think I might want to do this for my dissertation.’” His decision to join his mentee in pursuing this new line of research was another pivotal moment for Johnson. “It absolutely shaped the whole arc of my career, focusing a bit less on clinical treatment and a lot more on developmental relationships.”
Johnson’s next career move brought him to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he has been a faculty member ever since. As far as his research was concerned, this move was, in Johnson’s view, “such a natural, seamless transition because mentoring is so important in the military.” One of Johnson’s initial projects at the Naval Academy was a large study focused on retired Navy Admirals and their experience with mentoring in the fleet. One of the most powerful findings from the study, in his view, concerned the longevity of these mentoring relationships. “One of the things we asked was, ‘Why did the relationship end?’ and by far the most common response was that the mentor had died. It turns out that these relationships were lifelong. And they continued, even up to the point where the mentor was no longer living.” This finding was reminiscent of Johnson’s own relationship with his mentor from his days in graduate school. “We don’t see each other as often, but if I ever have a major career decision to make, I always reach out to him, even now. The effect of really great mentoring often lingers, and in the best case, these relationships become lifelong friendships.”
Johnson is particularly excited to speak to NORDP conference attendees about actionable strategies for moving beyond mentoring programs to creating cultures of mentoring, both within NORDP itself and within attendees’ organizations. “We know that a lot of talented junior folks fall through the cracks because they don’t think it’s for them or that they’re entitled to mentoring. And senior people feel like mentoring programs can be a burden and don’t engage.” For Johnson, building a mentoring culture means becoming a mentor-of-the-moment, someone who shows interest in junior colleagues in the day-to-day interactions we have at work. “Being a mentor-of-the-moment might mean being the kind of person who will initiate a conversation with a colleague about something you admired about their work, offering affirmation, or just saying, ‘Hey, if you ever want to drop by and just chat about where you’d like to go in the organization, I’ve got an open door,” he says. “If you have that kind of culture, we find that retention goes way up, satisfaction and belonging go way up. And I think we need to spend a lot more time thinking about our culture, not just our formalized programs.”
NORDP 2023 Keynote Speaker, Dr. Christine Yifeng Chen
From a young age, Christine Yifeng Chen had an affinity for the outdoors. Growing up in upstate New York, she spent many afternoons amusing herself in the local woods observing plants, rocks, and passing wildlife. When the sun was down or the weather was poor, she watched nature documentaries on public television and read books about historical expeditions and voyages, captivated by stories of field scientists working in far-flung places. Despite her enthusiasm, she never considered that outdoor field research was something she could ever do herself. After all, she had no camping or hiking experience, and hardly traveled outside of her hometown, as the costs of such activities were prohibitive.
That all changed when she “won the lottery,” as Chen puts it, by gaining admittance to Princeton University for her undergraduate studies with a full tuition financial aid package. Scanning the catalog of course offerings, she noticed that the earth science department offered classes with field trips, all expenses paid. Soon enough, in her first semester, she found herself in California, gazing at snow-capped mountains, climbing up sand dunes, and walking amongst ancient pine trees for the very first time. This formative experience set the stage for Chen’s future in field geology. “It was a complete culture shock,” Chen says. “Suddenly, I had access to all these resources at this school, to do all the things I’d always read about or seen on TV. It was nothing short of life changing.”
Chen understands first-hand the impact that access to social and material resources can have on one’s career. She will deliver the 2023 NORDP Conference opening keynote address, entitled “Racial disparities in research funding.” In her remarks, she will highlight results from a recent study she led showing systematic racial disparities in funding rates at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Using publicly available data, Chen and her colleagues showed that from 1999 to 2019, proposals by white researchers at NSF were funded at rates higher than most other non-white groups, and that these trends held regardless of scientific discipline and proposal type. Since similar patterns have been observed at the National institutes of Health, NASA, and other philanthropic funding organizations, they are likely widespread throughout the research funding ecosystem.
Despite countless of initiatives at colleges and universities to diversify the professoriate, data on faculty demographics indicate that higher education institutions appear to have little to show for it. Chen believes that the long-standing funding disparities have played a significant role in stymieing diversity goals: “Eliminating inequalities in STEM and academia will require a reorganization of what causes inequality in the first place: unequal access to social prestige and material resources.”
As a geologist and geochemist by training, Chen is very familiar with the lack of diversity amongst faculty. The geosciences are the least diverse field of all STEM disciplines in terms of race and ethnicity; less than 10% of geoscience PhD recipients are people of color, and little has changed in the last 40 years. And unlike other STEM disciplines, Asians are underrepresented amongst geoscience PhD recipients.
That statistic, along with the rise in anti-Asian sentiments during the pandemic, spurred Chen and two of her colleagues to start an affinity group, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Geosciences (AAPIiG), to build community for AAPIs in the discipline. It was through one of the early virtual AAPIiG community gatherings that Chen first learned from a senior academic about the “open secret” that Asian researchers have the lowest proposal success rates at the NSF. The rest is history.
Chen is eager to engage with the NORDP community about these widespread funding disparities and what we can do about them, both as individuals as well as a collective organization. She hopes that we might consider the funding data at our own institutions from both public and private funders with a critical eye. Chen also hopes that NORDP can mobilize a coordination action in response to these trends, given our unique vantage point as being embedded in the research community at multiple levels and sectors. “NORDP is ideally positioned to guide and catalyze action around this issue. If not you, who else?”
Chen is now at a national lab where she continues her geological and geochemistry research.
Help us welcome her to the NORDP stage in May.
Follow @NORDP_official on Twitter for all the latest #NORDP2023 updates.
NORDP fosters a culture of inclusive excellence by actively promoting and supporting diversity, inclusion, and equity in all its forms to expand our worldview, enrich our work, and elevate our profession.
The NORDP Consultant Program is dedicated to increasing the diversity of our national research ecosystem by providing research development services to minority-serving and emerging research institutions at no cost to the institution.
With the support of Eric and Wendy Schmidt via recommendation of the Schmidt Futures program, NORDP launched the NORDP Consultant Pilot Program in summer of 2021 to grow research capacity and competitiveness within HBCUs by increasing institutional capacity for research development. Camille Coley, Marta Collier-Youngblood, Jacob Levin, Mike Marcinkowski, LeKita Scott Dawkins, Michael Spires, Peggy Sundermeyer, Barbara Walker, and John Quyen Wickham comprise the group of NORDP Consultants working in the pilot program.
In December 2022, the NSF Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) Directorate awarded NORDP, Advancing Research Impact in Society (ARIS), and Spelman College resources to support the ideation and proposal development process for the Enabling Partnerships to Increase Innovation Capacity (EPIIC) program. Alongside these partners, NORDP Consultants will provide proposal development support and feedback on proposals being prepared in response to the solicitation.
At the same time, the NORDP Consultant Program added six new members to its ranks:
Michelle Collins
Michelle Collins: As the Director of Grant Process Operations for the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, Michelle oversees the proposal submission and review processes for the Center’s grant programs and provides pre-award support to the applicant community. She has nearly 15 years of experience in research development, grant administration, and program management, including positions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the Research Administrator for the Department of Surgery and the Managing Director for the UNC Nutrition Obesity Research Center. Michelle is also certified as a Research Administrator (CRA) and Pre-Award Research Administrator (CPRA) by the Research Administrators Certification Council.
Holly Hapke
Holly Hapke: Holly is a geographer and broadly trained interdisciplinary social scientist with over 25 years of experience in academic research, teaching, program and curriculum development, grants and research development, and higher education administration. She served as a tenured faculty member and Associate Dean at East Carolina University, and as Program Director at the NSF, where she co-managed multiple programs and worked on diversity initiatives. Currently, she is the inaugural Director of Research Development at the University of California Irvine, where she has supported the development and submission of over $100 million in grant proposals. She co-leads the NSF-funded California Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Social Science Advancement (CAHSSA) and is a founding member of INSciTS and NSF’s Growing Convergence Research College of Reviewers.
Dorota Huizinga
Dorota Huizinga: Dorota has over 14 years of experience in research administration and currently serves as the Associate Provost for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB). She is also a Principal Investigator on an NIH research capacity building grant (SPAD) awarded to CSUSB to help streamline the university’s sponsored programs infrastructure, support the Office of Research Development (ORD), and increase the diversity of faculty and students engaged in research. In her administrative positions, Dorota secured over $4.5M in capacity-building grants to support faculty and student success and various DEI initiatives. She has also established a new ORD and hired its first faculty director at multiple campuses and developed successful programs and supports to increase the number of faculty engaged in grant-seeking and the volume of sponsored programs.
Sobha Jaishankar
Sobha Jaishankar: Sobha has over 14 years of experience in research administration and currently oversees the functions of the Research Development division within UF Research. She established guidelines and SOPs for the different programs under the broad research development umbrella, including internal seed funding, limited submissions, faculty honorifics, large proposal development, faculty coaching, and the evaluation of centers and institutes. Sobha is also responsible for managing the Florida Space Institute’s Space Research Initiative at the University of Florida and the UF portion of the Florida High Tech Corridor Matching Grants Program. From FY 2014-FY 21, Research Development, under Sobha’s leadership, has assisted UF faculty in obtaining $142M in federal funding and provided assistance for another $529M in budget requests on unfunded proposals.
Don Takehara
Donald Takehara: Don is the Director for Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering, where he supports faculty in establishing funded research and partnerships with government agencies, foundations, and corporations. He is also responsible for Faculty Development and is a certified coach assisting faculty in career and leadership development. Previously, Don was the Director of the Center for Research & Innovation and Associate Professor at Taylor University for 9 years, where he had responsibility for research development, sponsored programs, tech transfer, business incubation, and corporate sponsored research. He has a background in chemical reaction engineering and catalysis and has led the evaluation and development of process and product technology in silicone technology, biotechnology, and electronics. Don has a PhD and MS in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University and a BS in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University.
Jana Watson-Capps
Jana Watson-Capps: Jana is an independent consultant who helps companies, universities, and non-profits with research development, strategic planning, and coalition building within the interdisciplinary life sciences. She has experience and strengths in research development, process development, interdisciplinary science and education, academic-industry partnerships, strategic planning, large-team management, multi-stakeholder project leadership, communicating science, grant writing, grants coaching, fundraising, and building research communities. Jana has been working full-time as an independent consultant for the past four years, and previously spent over seven years at the University of Colorado BioFrontiers Institute as Associate Director, Chief of Staff, and Head of Strategy. She received her Ph.D. in Biology from Georgetown University and her B.S. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University.
“I am excited to welcome our new NORDP Consultants and thrilled to be able to expand the NORDP Consultant Program with support from NSF,” said Dr. Kimberly Eck, NORDP Consultant Program Director, former NORDP President, and Associate Vice President at Emory University, “NORDP’s collaborations with the NSF TIP Directorate, ARIS, Spelman College, and Know Innovation on the EPIIC program is a new, experimental approach that has the potential to catalyze a paradigm shift in how institutions obtain federal funding.”
The New Opportunities for Research Development (NORD) Committee is excited to announce the NORD / InfoReady Grant Cycle II 2022 Awardees, sponsored by InfoReady and NORDP.
NORD/InfoReady Grant Awardee Sanjukta Choudhury
Sanjukta Choudhury, from the University of Saskatchewan, was awarded $4,714.18 for the project, “Identifying Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Gaps in Faculty Research to Inform Research Development Practices: The Case of a Canadian Research-Intensive University”
This project aims to advance Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in faculty research through identifying barriers that researchers face in academia for meaningful EDI integration in research, and by gathering inputs on possible actions to address those barriers. The proposal addresses a pressing question in the disciplinary field of Research Development (RD) and proposes a three-step plan: a) developing a better understanding of the details of the problem picture that our researchers are facing to generate and nurture an inclusive research environment, b) discussing/consulting the identified problems with RD professionals for possible solutions, and c) communicating the findings with the broader research community internationally. Choudhury anticipates that the findings will impact the perspectives and understanding of both the researchers and research administration leadership/ professionals, resulting in an expansion of the resource allocation and improved training / services around adopting a more inclusive research guidance and practices. The research will influence enhanced EDI skills for RD professionals and larger scale research and collaboration among RD professionals internationally, broadening the recognition that is necessary to sustain a deep and lasting change in RD.
NORD/InfoReady Grant Awardee Kathryn Duvall
Kathryn Duvall, from East Tennessee University, was awarded $5,000 for the project “Developing strategies to improve and facilitate collaborative research”
Through a collaboration with an university institute and a regional committee on research and academics, Duvall’s project seeks to better understand the barriers, opportunities, and facilitators to fostering and enhancing interdisciplinary research around a central focus area (child and family health) with administrators, faculty, staff, trainees, and community organization representatives in a regional sample of south central Appalachian institutions for higher education. Duvall will develop a data dashboard around a central research focus (child and family health) within the region to provide information that will improve communication about work being conducted in the region, and foster collaborative teams which include more clinical faculty.
NORD/InfoReady Grant Awardee, Pammala Petrucka
The Nursing Unit for Research & Scholarship Excellence (NURSE) led by Dr. Pammla Petrucka, from the University of Saskatchewan, was awarded $5,000 for the project “Exploring the role of research development in building a strong culture of research: Co-creating with researchers and research development professionals through participatory diagramming”
This study seeks to better understand how the professionals that support and strengthen the research process can build a positive research culture for faculty and institutions, and ultimately enhance research development as a profession. Petrucka and participants will create a research development cycle diagram to illustrate (i) how decentralized and targeted research development supports activities that can build research culture within the College of Nursing and beyond and (ii) identify lessons learned, best practices, tools, and resources to advance the profession within North America. The results of this study will provide insights into the role research development plays in creating a strong culture of research within an academic unit from the perspectives of researchers and research development professionals. By examining the beliefs, values, knowledge, and actions that build culture, research institutions will be better positioned to continue to create a permanent culture shift that builds an environment for research success.
An unyielding commitment to equity and inclusion has been a through-line of Dr. Sherilynn Black’s career, from her graduate training as a neurobiologist to her current position as Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement at Duke University. “I always had a desire to contribute to the scientific workforce in a way that was led by my values, and also led by a desire to expand knowledge and to expand people’s ability to understand and have access to science,” noted Black, reflecting on her professional journey, which has combined neuroscience, human behavior, higher education administration, and diversity work.
Black will give a plenary address to NORDP conference attendees entitled Examining Barriers and Identifying Solutions Toward Achieving Equity in STEM. In her remarks, she will explore the ways in which research development professionals can empower themselves and their colleagues to promote equity within their institutional environments and offer practical and easily adoptable steps toward changing systems and structures in academic organizations.
Black’s current work, which has been funded by HHMI, NIH, and Burroughs Wellcome Fund (among others), focuses on developing and measuring the effectiveness of interventions designed to promote diversity in academia. When asked about the ways in which her research interests have evolved she responded, “I was still interested in doing research, but wanted to do it in a way that really touched on the areas that were very important to me. I ended up transitioning from basic neuroscience to social neuroscience and then started focusing on race and equity more specifically.” As for how her research has informed her work as an administrator, Black points out, “My work is to design interventions. I study large scale datasets and look at the ways to design interventions to shift human behaviors towards equity. So, for me, the research that I do ties in very closely with a lot of the administrative roles I’ve held.”
While the connection between Black’s neurobiology background and her current research might not seem intuitive at first blush, the connection is clear to her. “To me, as a scientist, thinking about academia as an ecosystem is no different than thinking about a biological structure. Using statistical models has helped me learn how variables interact with one another. If you change one element of a model, how will it affect the downstream indicators of the rest of the model?” And Black is a strong proponent of applying the same rigorous scientific approach to her current work that she brought to the bench as a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher, noting,” I think a lot of times when it comes to work on diversity and equity topics people go off of their gut, or they see a successful initiative somewhere else, and they try to apply it locally without any contextual knowledge or evidence that it will be effective. They are not informed by the literature or by scholarly expertise. I like to use data to inform the practices that I develop for interventions. And I really do think that’s a big part of why they’ve been successful – because they’re evidence-based methodologies that are focused extensively on understanding the contextual knowledge, understanding the affective parts of motivation and behavior, and understanding the desired outcomes.”
Black views research development professionals and other academic staff as vital changemakers within their institutions when it comes to promoting a culture of inclusivity noting, “Research development professionals are critical for this work, because they are the ones who can create the culture, tone, and climate of training and work environments. Often times, students cycle in and out, and faculty may come and go, but staff play a critical role because they are often the longitudinal forces creating the culture that others cycle through.”
As Black is well aware, the hierarchy that can exist within academic institutions and companies alike can make changing the culture a challenging endeavor. “Ultimately, hierarchy can lead to a strong desire to cling to different norms for self-preservation. Anything that disrupts positionality or disrupts power structures can lead to challenges when you’re thinking about equity.” But despite these challenges, she notes the imperative for institutional change, stating “If the culture and climate is not one that allows all individuals to thrive, we will continue to see underrepresentation and attrition, or we will bring in scientists who have to assimilate to the current inequitable environment to survive. This means that we’re actually losing the benefit of the diversity that we sought to recruit in in the first place. Science will not be the best that it can be, and we won’t be as strong or as innovative of a field.”
Above all else, Black hopes that plenary attendees will come away with a sense of empowerment to step up at their own institutions. “I think that the more we create spaces where people feel that they have the agency and the right to speak up on what’s right and wrong, and the more that we all agree to subscribe to the norm that every person has the right to thrive and excel. That includes all students, faculty and staff. I think this will help more scientists to feel like they have the power to speak up when they see something going on.”
When someone is kind, they support the dignity of another person. When mentors are kind, they convey a sense of safety, which is good for learning, retention, and attention. NORDP conference attendees will learn more about the benefits of kindness and tips to bring new perspectives on kindness to our work.
“Kindness affirms inclusion,” says Dr. Mica Estrada, Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California at San Francisco’s School of Nursing. She will be the NORDP 2022 conference plenary speaker at 11:00 a.m. eastern time on Thurs., Apr. 28, discussing “Why Kindness Is Important when Mentoring in an Interconnected World.”
As a social psychologist, Estrada studies how people integrate into their field. “We look at how quality mentorship helps students feel they can do the science, develop their identity as scientists, and how they share community values,” she explains.
Estrada says kindness has always been at the forefront of her scholarship. “At about four years old, my first memory was when a US ship went into Chinese water. I remember thinking, will there be a war, why do we hurt each other?” She continues thinking about that later question in her research, and chooses to focus on how people connect to each other, and specifically on kindness as the solution.
She compares her passion for kindness in mentoring to tending a garden. “Instead of spending time pulling weeds, I decided to put effort into growing what we want to reduce the space for the things we don’t want to grow,” she says.
Estrada will share findings from her years of research with NORDP conference attendees, highlighting results that are relevant to mentoring students and faculty or working with other research development colleagues.
“We’ll be talking about ‘quality mentorship’,” she says. The first focus is on instrumental support, or the “nuts and bolts” activities, such as how to access physical spaces or scholarly journals. This will differ in each situation. The second focus is on psycho-social support, such as empathy, listening, and emotional presence. Again, the details will differ based on the relationship, but the concept is important.
Estrada’s research is well funded by the NSH, NIH, and HHMI. She says she finds grantwriting to be a creative, labor-intensive challenge as she explains what she wants to explore while being concrete and persuasive. She draws upon past experiences with non-profit groups and work with development officers. She is also engaged in community-service roles, serving on the National Research Council Committee’s Roundtable on the Future of STEM Education; the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus study on Advancing Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in STEM Organizations; and a NASA Minority University Research and Education Programs advisory committee.
Estrada focuses her research and time on understanding how to increase inclusion and equity in our education system. Her research methods identify educational interventions that facilitate integration into a community and increased engagement in the normative behaviors of that community for all students. She encourages us all to amplify what we want within our academic and professional environment, and she sees ample opportunity to do this.
“We’re at an interesting time in history,” she suggests. “COVID has shaken up the way we work. There’s an opportunity to not go back, but to go forward in a way that serves us as human beings.”
NORDP fosters a culture of inclusive excellence by actively promoting and supporting diversity, inclusion and equity in all its forms to expand our worldview, enrich our work, and elevate our profession.
NORDP invites applications for attendance grants for the 2019 Annual NORDP Research Development Conference in Providence, Rhode Island (April 28 – May 1) from members in need of financial support beyond what their institutions or organizations can provide. Conference Attendance Grants will cover the Conference registration fee and may provide hotel accommodations for 1, 2 or 3 nights. Related other expenses, such as travel, are expected to be contributed by the grantee’s institution and/or the grantee.
Aligned with NORDP’s goals to increase diversity and promote inclusive excellence throughout the organization, we encourage applications from our members who are from under-represented minority populations or who are employed by Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) or other Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs). All Regular Members in good financial standing who haven’t received Conference Attendance Grants in the last 3 years are eligible to apply. Exception: These grants are not available to current and prior NORDP Board Members, Affiliate Members, or Consultants.
Grantees are expected to volunteer at the 2019 Annual Conference and to serve on a NORDP committee, subcommittee, or working group in the year following the Conference.
The application deadline is Tuesday, February 12 at Noon, Eastern Standard Time. PLEASE DO NOT REGISTER FOR THE CONFERENCE UNTIL YOU ARE NOTIFIED OF THE STATUS OF YOUR APPLICATION (by March 1)!
NORDP News 