The ultimate goal for the NIH BRAD project and desired impact of our institutional development plan (IDP) is to build a deeper culture of research at St. Mary's College, and thus to better support the education of well-prepared diverse students interested in research careers. Our Research and Sponsored Program (RSP) office is effective but underfunded and cannot address increasing demands for pre-and post-award services. Our teacher-scholar faculty is talented and engages undergraduates in research, but delivering high quality research experiences for undergraduates is becoming more costly, both in terms of money and time needed to ensure student preparedness. The NIH BRAD award will partially fund an increase in RSP staff and capacity-building activities for research and research administration.
The specific aims are to 1) increase faculty research productivity and competitiveness through faculty development activities and improved mentor/collaborator networks, and 2) improve support for research and research administrative services by providing leadership, internal policy changes, and enhanced research administration competencies. The specific outcomes used to evaluate program success will be the following: number of submitted proposals for external funding, quality of proposals, proportion of faculty and students engaged in research, number of research proposals developed in collaboration with external institutions, and amount of staff participation in competency training. The EA will combine the role of research developer and administrator, and we have assembled a strong team to govern the NIH BRAD project and IDP. St. Mary's College is an accessible, affordable public institution whose leadership and faculty embrace diversity, student engagement and research as part of an innovative liberal arts curriculum. Successful implementation of the NIH BRAD program will provide increased opportunities for faculty and students to excel in research. Given that twenty three percent of all our students and 11% of underrepresented students graduate in STEM disciplines at St. Mary's College, increased research opportunities in STEM will affect a large number of graduates likely to enter research careers. To facilitate underrepresented students' transition to the academic culture of STEM courses at our institution, St. Mary's College has a well-established set of support structures, i.e., innovative interventions such as a) Treisman-style STEM Emerging Scholars Program workshops, (b) summer research opportunities, and (c) a system of mentoring, advising, and close tracking of student progress.
Service delivery will be expanded to reach a greater number of faculty and to include more diverse services to reduce faculty administrative burden and improve compliance. Sustainable faculty participation in research is planned through incremental changes in college policies and practices affecting course buy-outs, reinvestment of IDC recovery, formal recognition of research productivity and differential faculty teaching loads based on research activity. St. Mary's College has a teacher-scholar culture and faculty research productivity will increase with increased recognition, time and resources for high quality research and expanded external networks as outlined in the institutional development plan.
