By Ann Comer-Woods, USF Research & Innovation
The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year, $3 million collaborative grant to the University of South Florida Research Development Institute and The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) to develop a new post-award training model for research administrators at liberal arts colleges across the United States.
The Primarily Undergraduate Institution Management Excellence in Research (PRIMER) program aims to upskill research administrators at these smaller colleges so they can more successfully manage awards at their institutions. The adoption of the PRIMER model will improve award management and support increased institutional research activities by producing a better trained workforce to support the research enterprise.
“I am grateful to the National Science Foundation GRANTED program for their support for capacity-building programs that sustain and strengthen the nation's scientific enterprise,” said USF Research Development Institute Director Sandra Justice. “Grant management requires sophisticated skills, acumen for critical thinking and creative problem solving. PRIMER will deliver stackable micro-credentials designed to upskill career research administrators, grant managers and PIs. The future of the field are life-long learners, continuously honing their skills.”
TCNJ Grants & Sponsored Research Director Amy Cuhel-Schuckers and USF Research Development Institute Director Sandra Justice
PRIMER will leverage the Colleges of Liberal Arts Sponsored Programs (CLASP) community, itself comprised of more than 360 institutions and representative of the 1,921 public and private non-profit PUIs, to test and validate the new grants management training model. PRIMER will encompass stage-by-stage support structures, training modules, compliance coaching and a resource repository housed in the USF Digital Commons collection. The repository will be a searchable, open-source platform for training materials and post-award templates, collaboratively conceived and designed to share institutional knowledge within and across participating institutions.
“Our partnership with Sandy Justice and the University of South Florida will leverage Sandy’s course development strengths and provide an easily accessible online hub of curated training modules, documents and publications that can be used as a template for replication at other institutions,” said TCNJ Grants & Sponsored Research Director Amy Cuhel-Schuckers.
TCNJ will serve as the initial development site for the PRIMER model. It will then be tested at 12 colleges within the CLASP community, providing baseline data for implementing the program at 30 colleges.
“We’re excited about this five-year collaborative research award,” Cuhel-Schuckers said. “It is designed to address the structure and needs of research administration at smaller PUIs. Research administration ‘generalists’ are common in smaller institutional settings, where the same individual, or a small team, might be responsible for grant development and pre-award activities as well as grant accounting and post-award grant management.
“Grants support in these settings may often, at least initially, be focused on pre-award activities to bring in funds, with less support or consideration for post-award needs. The overall approach, structures, and training models inherent in the PRIMER model will address these needs and support the community of research-active PUIs.”
PRIMER will publish detailed case studies of the implementation of the model at TCNJ and other CLASP institutions, offering a starting point for utilization and further adaptation of this model at rural colleges, non-profits, small businesses, private research laboratories and local education agencies.