Using a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the Rhode Island School of Design is looking to expand its research and industry partnerships.
The funds, which were part of a three-year grant awarded in October, come as part of the Enabling Partnerships to Increase Innovation Capacity grant, which provides awardees with “support to develop capacity and institutional knowledge to help them build new partnerships, secure future external funding and tap into their regional innovation ecosystems,” according to a NSF press release.
Institutions of higher education that receive this grant divide themselves into cohorts of schools with similar goals and challenges. RISD, Guilford College, the State University of New York at Brockport and the University of Southern Arkansas make up the Supporting Partnerships for Advancement, Research and Knowledge cohort.
RISD identified potential SPARK groupmates through a “speed dating” process, where schools were divided into a series of breakout rooms over Zoom to introduce themselves and discuss their institutional goals, said RISD Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in Printmaking Tyanna Buie. Buie serves as a co-principal investigator for the grant, acting as a liaison between RISD administrators and faculty members.
The participating institutions later gathered in person at a conference in Atlanta, where they made their final decisions on partner schools. Katherine Cooper, the director for academic and creative partnerships at RISD and a principal investigator for the grant, said that the initial online introductions “provided this baseline of familiarity, so that once we were in a room with all these hundreds of people,” RISD’s representatives already knew which schools to prioritize.
The four institutions “will support each other, learn from one another and empower all so that each institution may leverage its specific resources and expertise and address its region’s challenges,” according to RISD’s award description.
Cooper said that the award had a focus on “emerging research institutions” and aims to support schools that “aren’t necessarily set up with robust partnership and research infrastructures.”
“We’re really excited,” they added. “It’s not every day that you see a National Science Foundation grant that is focused on partnership activity.”
RISD is still in the early stages of deciding how it will use its grant money. To inform the infrastructure they will create, the school is gathering information to “better understand the current state of RISD’s research and partnerships enterprise,” Cooper said.
As of now, RISD has used the grant money to hire a program manager to assist the school with grant funding allocation. They also plan to institute a faculty fellows program to grow and improve faculty research, Cooper said.
According to Cooper, RISD hopes to use the grant money to give faculty the tools to “engage in sponsored research and sponsored studios and partnerships with regional and global organizations.”
In the past, RISD has partnered with companies and projects such as Tiffany & Co., Hyundai and the Emmett Till Memory Project. With this grant comes a renewed commitment to “enhance our communication around partnership,” Cooper said.
Other schools in the cohort have similar plans.
Jose Maliekal, an associate professor at SUNY Brockport and the principal investigator for his school’s grant, said SUNY Brockport has created a faculty fellowship program with grant funds. The program will allow professors to decrease their teaching load and participate in professional development opportunities to give them the time and skills to work on research activities.
“We want faculty to grow professionally by doing research,” Maliekal said. “We want them to have collaboration with regional partners.”
RISD is working with their grant cohort to address issues all four institutions face, including “heavy faculty teaching loads, insufficient research infrastructure and inadequate institutional incentives for partnership development,” Buie said.
The cohort meets monthly to give each other advice, Cooper said.
Abdel Bachri, dean of the College of Science and Engineering and a professor of physics at Southern Arkansas University, serves as the principal investigator for his school’s grant. He noted that each of the schools involved in the cohort has something unique to offer.
Get The Herald delivered to your inbox daily.
“(We) just share our knowledge about our strengths, and then we also make resources available for us to support research and grantsmanship for all these schools,” he said.
The ultimate goal of the partnership is to “eventually attract other institutions or companies to work with us as individuals,” Buie said. She hopes that by working with the other institutions in their cohort, RISD can “get more interest and connections.”
“RISD is a place full of incredibly curious, creative, intelligent people,” Cooper said. “This is an opportunity to give those people the skills that they need to pursue that curiosity and creativity even further.”
Izabella Piatkowski is a senior staff writer covering the Rhode Island School of Design.