The aim of this conference is to provide Associate Deans of engineering from smaller, primarily public, institutions with the practical, effective and field-based knowledge they need to successfully address some of the challenges to the development of research and graduate education at smaller universities.

Some of these challenges involve forming best practices for the following:

1. Helping faculty to be successful, i.e. getting more funding and national recognition
2. Assisting junior faculty, especially during their pre-tenure years, through mentoring, particularly for highly prestigious and competitive grants such as the NSF CAREER awards and its equivalent awards from other agencies (e.g. Air Force Young Investigator Award)
3. Providing faculty the necessary infrastructure for writing proposals for large funding amounts
4. Facilitating both disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaborative groups or clusters
5. Increasing research productivity as well as enhancing the impact of the research
6. Cultivating research leaders who might be PIs on future large proposals
7. Defining and empowering the position of Associate Dean of Research in a consistent way
8. Providing Associate Deans of Research a system of metrics both for self-evaluation and for evaluation of their Colleges/Schools of Engineering
9. Recruiting best quality graduate students especially domestic students, possibly from one another’s institutions
10. Recruiting women faculty and faculty from underrepresented minority groups
11. Developing inter-institutional collaborations since smaller sized schools do not have the critical mass necessary for having the program managers, proposal managers, research assistantships needed to put together large funding proposals especially for Institutes or Centers
12. Optimizing Associate Deans relationships with their Deans
13. Optimizing Associate Deans relationships with their engineering faculty colleagues. The significance of forming best practices for the items listed is that Associate Deans, the faculty and the students themselves will better serve the advancement of students’ education in engineering, one of the STEM disciplines which is of great importance to society and the nation.

The two day conference will have presentations, lectures and breakout sessions as the means of providing Associate Deans with the practical, effective and field-based knowledge they need. The presentation speakers will include federal agency program managers who will present details about what leads to successful proposals in their programs. Associate Deans of Research who have dealt with smaller school problems will present as will successful proposal writers from these same sized schools. Lastly, practitioners will be complemented by presentations of mentoring experts who can put the practical advice of the practitioners into a wider context. In addition, plenary lectures will also provide a broader context for specifics of practical implementation. Breakout sessions will complement the presentations and plenary lecturers by giving Associate Deans the opportunity to discuss the tactics and strategies they have used with those of other ADRs and with those suggested by the speakers and lecturers. Scribes will keep records of the practical actions discussed so that a compilation of field tested techniques can be created for subsequent dissemination.

More details about the specific agenda will follow.

Some modest travel support will be available.

Please feel free to alert other Associate Deans of Research from small or mid-sized schools (150 Faculty members or less) about the Conference.

This workshop is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, CBET #1646808.

Please RSVP at http://go.uic.edu/COE1011and1012.