Following Kent State University’s designation as an R1 (very high research) institution, the Division of Research and Sponsored Programs set its sights on investments to maintain this designation. The most recent R1 retention program focused on increasing federal expenditures — or the amount of grant dollars spent — over the next three years.
The “Game Changer Pilot Program” is a new approach to providing pilot funds to support research. Pilot funds are internal, smaller-scale awards that allow researchers to demonstrate the likelihood of their research success, thus increasing the chances of winning external funding. Prior pilot programs have provided relatively smaller amounts of funding and have shown inconsistent returns on this investment. The “Game Changer” program provided awards that were much larger than those traditionally supported at Kent State.
“When we look at our funding history, externally, over time, there is a very small incline over the last nine years,” said Douglas Delahanty, Ph.D., professor and vice president for Research and Sponsored Programs. “For us to improve as an R1 institution we need to be increasing our expenditures yearly not by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but by millions of dollars per year, and that's what's going to allow us to maintain this designation.”
With $1 million to invest, the “Game Changer” program accepted proposals with budgets of up to $1 million. “Our thought was ‘Let's invest in bigger things,’” Delahanty said. “Applicants had to explain how this funding would be game-changing for them.They had to explain how the faculty involved in the proposal would be able to submit more and higher quality grant applications in the next three years.”
RASP allocated about $1 million for this program, but with cost sharing from various university partner contributors, it could fund over $2 million in requests. Out of 33 proposals submitted, RASP was able to fund six. Successful projects ranged from work with a multimodal microscope used for cell tissue to a student-life study aimed at measuring student wellness across campus.
The dollars spent on this program will count as institutional expenditures for the next R1 designation as long as they are spent by the end of June. Many projects proposed certain types of equipment that could be purchased relatively quickly. All equipment had to be placed in a shared facility and made accessible to the research community as a whole.
“This is not a piece of equipment that you buy for a limited set of individuals and then put behind a locked door so nobody else can use it,” said Michael Kavulic, Ph.D., assistant vice president of research administration for RASP. “Because we're committing central funds, we're really trying to approach these as more open resources available to anyone who has a need for using them.”
Another benefit of the Game Changer program was that RASP was able to work with faculty whose proposals were not funded in order to help them find other avenues for funding such as state or federal programs or through other foundations that are willing to help.
As the division brainstorms and pilots new ways to support its researchers, Kent State continues to exemplify what it means to be an R1 institution, and the reinvestment into bigger projects is a prime example of that.
“We're doing this in part so that we can get follow-on funding and hopefully this increases some of our metrics,” Kavulic said. “But we're also seeing an investment of resources and energy into research that has come as a consequence of us realizing that we are in a category of institutions that are producing incredible research results.”
To learn more, please visit the Division of Research and Sponsored Programs.