From the Vice President

I am enjoying seeing our campus filled with returning students, and realized that I am entering my third year at the University of Idaho. How fast the time has gone!

I have enjoyed implementing a vision to enhance our research enterprise: to catalyze new research; to build local, regional, national and international collaborations; and to promote and celebrate the full spectrum of research, scholarship and creative activities. Providing support services to our research community is important to increasing our institutional competitiveness and attracting extramural research funding.

One of the services that the Office of Research and Economic Development is proud to launch is our newly established Research and Faculty Development (RFD) team, led by Carly Cummings, Ph.D.

Research development is a fast-growing profession, evidenced by increasing investments from universities to support research development offices on their campuses. The National Organization for Research Development Professionals (NORDP) is a rapidly-growing professional society dedicated to developing programs to facilitate research excellence. The U of I is proud to be an active NORDP member.

Our new RFD team will serve the U of I research community by providing proactive and capacity-building resources and services. The services are grouped into three general categories: proposal development, research development and faculty development.

Proposal development services span the entire spectrum of developing a proposal, from the identification of funding opportunities, to facilitating interactions with a program officer, to reviewing and editing the project narrative supporting documents.

Research development services support large (>$1M) proposal efforts. These complex, strategic efforts require high-level coordination of tasks and organization across a diverse group of participants. RFD team members will be an integral part the proposal “lifecycle,” from managing the timeline to developing strategic approaches and building partnerships with multiple stakeholders, as well as providing the more traditional proposal support functions.

Finally, competitive proposal writing is a skill that takes time to fully develop and master. To this end, RFD offers programs and services designed to enhance these skills. For example, “NSF CAREER All Year,” is a new year-long program that aims to prepare high quality competitive proposals for the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. Announcements of upcoming events will be shared through the Daily Register and the OSPPI listserv.

In addition to providing resources and services supporting faculty efforts, RFD will also manage the University of Idaho’s limited submission and faculty award nomination processes.

I invite you to visit Morrill Hall and meet the team, and I encourage you to visit the RFD website to see a detailed menu of the proposal development services that team provides and to request support for developing your research efforts. I welcome any suggestions of ways this team can support your research, scholarship or creative activities.

Please join me in welcoming RFD as a partner in the execution of the University of Idaho’s strategic plan to support and expand our outstanding faculty’s scholarly and creative efforts across the state of Idaho! Go Vandals!