Dr. Liz Shay, Senior Grants Development Consultant
For the past several years, institutes of higher education have been seeing a decline in student enrollment. The National Center for Education Statistics projects that undergraduate enrollment will decline by 9% between 2021 and 2031, continuing a trend that was also present in the previous decade (https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98). Diversifying where income is coming from can help many institutions continue to provide their offerings. Although it is not a possibility for every institution, thinking about transitioning your organization from an education-focused school to a more research-intensive entity can open additional opportunities. For example, research grant funding that goes to faculty researchers also typically includes an indirect cost component that is used to support facilities and administration expenses for the institution to provide necessary overhead for the researchers to conduct their work, thereby enabling your organization to support that work. We have seen many schools working towards this goal by building research capabilities.
An easy way to quantify this type of goal is to consider your institution’s Carnegie Classification. Many institutions are interested in moving up from a M1 (Master’s Colleges and Universities – Larger programs) to D/PU (Doctoral/Professional Universities) or from the D/PU level to R2 (Doctoral Universities – High research activity) and from there to R1 (Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity). Although this system does not apply to some types of organizations, such as Special Focus Institutions and Tribal Colleges and Universities, looking at similar levels of goals for research activity can be a beneficial way to measure moving from an education-focused institution to a more research-intensive organization.
To be competitive for receiving research monies (a key component of the Carnegie Classification for R2 and R1 institutions), your college or university must have sufficient research capacity for faculty to pursue funding for their work. The investments needed to provide additional research infrastructure and training can be costly, but there are ways to work towards these goals through grant-funded projects.
Ways to Build Research Capacity
There are many different ways that your institution can approach building research capacity. Each of these approaches can be done on their own or in concert with other efforts. Below are a few of these types of approaches and examples of grants that can support capacity-building work.
Collaborative Opportunities
For institutions relatively new to pursuing research funding in earnest, collaborating with more experienced institutions is a great way to build capacity and grant funding skills and knowledge. Build relationships with the more research-intensive institutions within your region or state and start having conversations about collaborating on research capacity-building efforts. Often these types of organizations are interested in leading projects and collaborating with smaller and more under-resourced institutions as sub-recipients. If you are a more research-intensive institution in a region or state where there are few, if any, other organizations of that type, consider building collaborations with those smaller institutions and developing plans to pursue funding to build research capacity across the region.
Several funding opportunities could support this type of work. For example, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This program is designed to support research capacity-building, usually across an entire state that currently receives relatively little in the way of research dollars. There are a few different versions of this program from different federal funding agencies, but they are all interested in supporting efforts to build capacity in states that receive the lowest percentage of that agency’s research dollars each year. The exact list of eligible states varies from funder to funder and year to year, but it usually includes the lowest half of states and territories for research dollars received from that agency in the previous year. Applications are usually led by a larger relatively research-intensive institution within that state (usually the large public research university) and projects will include both research infrastructure and training components.
Another popular program is the Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) program from the National Science Foundation. This program supports networking, compute, and storage hardware purchases to support science and engineering research, as well as related education. Some of the funding tracks allow a leadership institution (again, usually a large public research university) to lead a project to provide shared networking, compute, or storage resources to smaller and under-resourced institutions within their region.
Internal Infrastructure Opportunities
Institutions that have some current research occurring but want to build out additional research capacity can consider opportunities that will expand the cyberinfrastructure on the campus to better support their researchers. These grant programs will add networking, compute, or other infrastructure resources to enable researchers to conduct cutting-edge work. The availability of this equipment will allow researchers to approach important questions in their field, which will make them competitive for research grant monies to support that work. The additional research infrastructure capacity can also help with recruiting new faculty researchers to the institution to further build expertise.
The grant that is probably the most popular to support campus research cyberinfrastructure upgrades is one that was already discussed in the previous section above, Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*). In addition to the Region funding tracks, there are also opportunities focused on individual institutes of higher education campuses. This program supports networking, compute, and storage hardware purchases to support science and engineering research on a college or university campus. Successful applicants are institutes of higher education with current science and engineering research that would be better enabled with additional cyberinfrastructure.
The National Science Foundation also understands that other expensive, shared-use research equipment is necessary to enable research. The most popular program within this category is the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant. MRI supports the purchase of one piece of shared-use research equipment, which can be an integrated instrument (pieces that only work when they work together, such as with high-performance computing). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have similar programs as well, coded as S10 grants. These programs can all support researchers in a specific field of interest to each agency or could support researchers across multiple fields who need similar equipment. Competitive applicants are institutions that already have relevant research being conducted on their campuses that would be improved or expanded through access to the proposed shared-use equipment.
The Department of Defense (DOD) has a similar group of grants called the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP). These grants are funded by the Army, Navy, and Air Force and support the purchase of a single piece of shared-use research equipment. Unlike MRI or the S10 grants, DURIP is more focused on research-related education in DOD-relevant fields that will be enabled by the equipment. Applicants will focus on how graduate and undergraduate students will be better able to be involved in research with the purchase of the instrumentation. The additional student researchers will also enable more research to be conducted at recipient institutions, ultimately opening up more research grant opportunities to faculty researchers.
Building Personnel Capabilities
In addition to building research capacity through additional cyberinfrastructure, institutions must also consider building expertise for members of their research community. Research-intensive institutions must have sufficient information technology employees who can support the research cyberinfrastructure. They must also have faculty members and graduate students with relevant skills to conduct research.
Both of these types of considerations are potentially grant-fundable. Several funders have started to consider the importance of training to support the United States’ research capabilities. Individual grant programs typically focus on particular aspects of training. Workforce development grants, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) Training-Based Workforce Development for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Grant, focus on providing generalist and specialist knowledge to support research infrastructure. In the case of this particular grant, projects can focus on formal or informal training for cyberinfrastructure professionals and contributors, as well as cyberinfrastructure users (such as faculty researchers and graduate students). These skills will allow individuals to effectively develop, support, and utilize advanced cyberinfrastructure for research applications. The effective utilization of available equipment will open up additional funding to support more research at an institution.
Other grant programs are more specifically focused on training current and future researchers to be as capable as possible in their chosen field. For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a full set of Research Career Development Awards, coded as K grants. These grants provide specialized training for graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and early career researchers to allow them to be effective researchers. There are also opportunities to support mentorship to allow current researchers to expand upon or shift their research expertise and focus. These opportunities are usually collaborations between experienced research-intensive institutions and institutions looking to build research capacity to allow for the exchange of knowledge.
Next Steps
As was discussed in the sections above, there are multiple pathways that your institution can pursue to build research capacity. Each of these approaches can be worked individually or in concert. The best method to consider will depend on where your organization currently stands with research capabilities, both from an infrastructure perspective and with faculty researchers receiving grant funding.
If your organization is very new to research or you would like to just have a small component of research happening on your campus, a great place to start is to build collaborations with larger research-intensive universities in your region and work with them on collaborative opportunities such as those described above. As you start to have some experience, continue to build those collaborations, and pursue those types of opportunities, but begin to evaluate opportunities to build personnel capabilities. Most of these grant programs will be most successful if you apply in collaboration with more experienced institutions.
For organizations with some research experience, you are in a position to apply for programs that will support your internal infrastructure. You can also consider opportunities to build personnel capabilities and many of these grants will be ones that you can pursue independently. Finally, if your organization is already quite research-intensive (R1 or perhaps R2), then consider leading collaborative opportunities and help other institutions build research capabilities in coordination with your efforts.
Wherever you are currently with research on your campus, considering grant opportunities that build research capacity can be fruitful. These programs will allow your faculty to be at the forefront of their fields, which can lead to additional research funding to support their work and the recruitment of additional experienced researchers to your faculty.