APLU Joins with Four Institutions to Develop New Approaches for Supporting Faculty in Undertaking Public Impact Research

Washington, DC – Seeking to increase the societal impact of university research, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) today announced a multi-year collaborative effort with four public research universities to identify and promulgate new approaches to support faculty and researchers undertaking Public Impact Research. PIR is a framework for university research that improves lives and serves society locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.

The effort, called Supporting Public Impact Research through Institutional Transformation (SPIRIT), is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF ADVANCE #2404600). SPIRIT will work with four partner universities – the University of California, Davis; Pennsylvania State University; the University of Texas at San Antonio; and Washington State University – to pilot new approaches to improve the evaluation and support an environment for more PIR on their campuses. Pilot project focus areas range from providing additional training and support to promotion and tenure review committees, ongoing professional development activities for scholars, a micro-grant program, and a partnership with university librarians to support faculty in documenting their impact.

“Public research universities have a rich tradition of working with their communities to tackle vexing challenges through research and community engagement, but too many barriers can still stand in the way of greater impact,” said Dr. Jessica Bennett, Assistant Vice President of STEM Education at APLU and Principal Investigator on the project. “We know one longstanding hurdle to greater faculty engagement in Public Impact Research can be a narrow focus on faculty evaluation and assessment. By working with institutions that want to broaden their assessment practices to provide greater incentives for PIR work, we’re aiming to identify and elevate additional institutional paths for enhanced public impact.”

“This project presents a promising development in increasing the currently limited empirical evidence on the effectiveness of different institutional change efforts to support public-impact research,” said Dr. Jennifer Renick, Assistant Professor of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Research at the University of Memphis and a co-Principal Investigator on the project. “I’m very excited about the potential of our findings helping to advance public-impact research at many universities across the country.”

APLU will work with partner institutions to:

• Understand strategies to support faculty engaging in PIR through campus pilot projects.
• Generate cross-campus learning through a facilitated community.
• Elevate learning from SPIRIT to other practitioners and university leaders through convenings, workshops, and toolkits.
• Engage in mutual knowledge exchange with related national efforts, projects, and organizations through engagement with national knowledge partners (ADVANCE Partnership: Strategic Partnership for Alignment of Community Engagement in STEM, Advancing Research Impact in Society, Association of Research Libraries, Promotion and Tenure in Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Pew Charitable Trusts’ Evidence Project.