LAS Strategic Plan 2021-2025

Increase faculty excellence by protecting the rich intellectual diversity in the college and expanding core strengths – including emerging areas – in creative activities and research across the college through strategic investments that maintain or enhance quality and distinction.

Actions:

1. Initiate a process through which units in the college identify their core strengths in research and creative activity.
2. Engage with the LAS research community to evaluate the intellectual diversity of the college.
3. Maintain and enhance core strengths through strategic hires and improved infrastructure.
4. Enhance programs to reward faculty excellence in research and creative activities.

Increase faculty excellence by promoting intellectual diversity and facilitating interdisciplinary partnerships to understand and address societal grand challenges.

Actions:

1. Create thematic hiring programs around societal grand challenges.
2. Value interdisciplinary programs and collaboration in faculty evaluation.
3. Provide resources and logistical support for emerging, cross-cutting creative activities and research.

Increase research excellence by promoting the inclusion of historically underrepresented minority groups in research and creative activity. Expand the range of research that we value to promote the research agendas of scholars from historically underrepresented minority groups and eliminate barriers that have impeded the inclusion and success of those scholars.

Actions:

1. Task a working group with developing strategies to better recognize and encourage the full range of research in LAS disciplines.
2. Increase research support for faculty from historically underrepresented minority groups.
3. Create and support pathways to involve historically under-represented minority students in research, and encourage and enable those students to participate in them.
4. Encourage faculty members to include students from historically underrepresented minority groups in research and creative activity (including through such programs as TRIO McNair Scholars).

Promote and support excellence in undergraduate and graduate student involvement in research and scholarship.

Actions:

1. Develop a structure that academic units can adopt for an undergraduate student capstone experience.
2. Develop partnerships with university programs such as the Discovery Partners Institute and the Office of Undergraduate Research to support funding for student research.
3. Create the position of research liaison to connect undergraduate students to research mentors across LAS.
4. Support faculty efforts to secure extramural training grants for student researchers.
5. Provide students with information about intramural and extramural research funding opportunities.