NORDP 2018 Conference

#NORDP2018 By the Numbers

I hope everyone who attended NORDP’s 2018 10th Annual Research Development Conference in Arlington last week had a safe and uneventful return home, and that you didn’t find your inboxes and desks too cluttered with things to attend to when you went back to work.

Just a few brief statistics about the meeting that I thought might be of interest. This year, we had:

1 leadership forum
1 short course
4 workshops
4 plenary or keynote addresses or panels
16 sponsors (a record!)
33 networking dinners over the first two nights of the conference, with 250 participants
40 individual or panel presentations
54 posters (not including NORDP’s own committee and programmatic posters)
598 registrants (plus 6 on-site registrations, for a total of 604; also a record!)

If you weren’t able to attend the meeting this year, or if you’d like to re-live a little of the experience, check out the conference recap video:

(It’s also available on the NORDP homepage, in case this link doesn’t work.).

We won’t have the full picture until the Evaluation Committee submits its report to the Board of Directors (probably in September), but all of the comments I heard (or overheard in passing) were uniformly positive. (Speaking of evaluations, if you haven’t yet completed all of yours, please do so: that information is of tremendous help to the Board and the planning committee as we start the process for putting together next year’s meeting.)

Kudos to everybody who helped make this meeting as successful as it was. And a very special thanks to our two stalwart conference co-chairs, Karen Eck (Old Dominion University) and Kari Whittenberger-Keith (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). We couldn’t have done it without you!

If you’re looking for presentations or materials from sessions at the conference that you either attended or wanted to browse because you couldn’t make the session, please be patient. The conference team will be contacting the presenters to get final copies of presentation materials shortly. Once they’re available, they’ll be posted to the conference program page. If you don’t find a hyperlink next to the presentation you’re looking for, that means the materials haven’t been made available yet. Also please note that we do not post materials from the leadership forum or the workshops, as that content is only available to the participants in those sessions.

Lastly, if you missed the announcement at the conference, save the date for #NORDP2019: April 29-May 1, 2019, at the Omni in Providence, Rhode Island!

Michael Spires
NORDP President

NORDP 2018 Conference Cameo: Natalie Fields

#NORDP2018 starts Monday, May 7 in Arlington, VA. Keep checking back here at the blog and on our Twitter feed (@NORDP_official) for live conference updates. Register here: http://www.nordp.org/conferences.
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Who: Natalie Fields, Director of Strategic Initiatives and Research Communications
Where: Emory University School of Nursing
Number of years in research development: 7
Length of NORDP membership: 1
Number of NORDP conferences attended: 1
What is the most interesting place you’ve visited? A coral reef

I came to Emory University in 2011 with no background in academic research. I had come from a non-profit as a director of development, therefore, I had some knowledge about grants but was still a far ways off from NIH R-level experimental research! I worked as a Pre-award research administrator for about five years. Currently, I work in the Office of Nursing Research, directing our strategic initiatives (i.e., mock reviews, lunch & learns, research dissemination) to support faculty, students and fellows in their research endeavors.

Last year’s NORDP conference has played a huge role in my current position. Our office restructured a few years ago, which opened up the opportunity for us to redefine some of our services. The timing for finding NORDP was perfect. I attended the 2017 conference and for the first time was able to clearly define my role (particularly outside of pre- and post-award research administration). When I returned from the conference I had great perspective and strategic vision about what direction I wanted to take our office in. At the conference, I learned more about how other schools organize and manage all the “other stuff” not directly related to proposal development or award management, such as research communications and fostering external relationships—so much so, that I came back from the conference and presented a plan for expanding our office’s services to include more strategic initiatives and research communications. This led me to a promotion from Senior Coordinator to the Associate Director of the Office of Nursing Research. Thank you, NORDP!

At this year’s conference I look forward to engaging with colleagues from other institutions at the networking dinners (they’re great!). Also, I have new ideas for my office and I think this year’s sessions will help me think through those ideas and gather new information to formulate them into a plan.

To get the most out of the conference I would recommend having plenty of business cards to hand out and brainstorm questions with your team before you go so that everyone can get the most out of the conference even if they aren’t there.

See you there!

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We hope to see you at the Conference, which will be held May 7-9, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, VA. For more information about the conference program or to register, visit http://www.nordp.org/conferences. Follow @NORDP_official on Twitter for all the latest #NORDP2018 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.

NORDP 2017 conference materials available!

Presentations from the 2017 9th Annual Research Development Conference are now available on the conference program site. If you presented at the conference and your materials are not posted, please send your final presentation slides (and any accompanying materials) to rdconf@nordp.org and we’ll see to it that they’re posted.

Further, thanks to NORDP sponsor Digital Science, we will be making conference presentations available (with indexing, metadata, and DOIs for each presentation) available through a NORDP instance of FigShare in the near future.

Finally, it’s not too soon to start thinking about presenting at the 2018 NORDP meeting! Next year’s meeting will be held Monday, May 7, through Wednesday, May 9, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, VA. We hope to see you there!