RADCon: Research Administration and Development Conference
Creating Capacity and Connections across the Northern Plains
Dates: June 6-7, 2024
Where: Black Hills State University at Rapid City, 4300 Cheyenne Blvd, Box Elder, SD
For more information: sdsu.radcon@sdstate.edu or 605-688-6696
The June 2024 conference will connect research support professionals from across the Northern Plains’ states of South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The conference is central to the project, supported by the National Science Foundation’s GRANTED program, which aims to improve research support and service capacity at emerging research institutions. The award will help support travel costs for 50 research support professionals to attend. A virtual option is also available for those unable to attend in-person.
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This goal of this project is to build research support capacity across the five-state Northern Plains region (Dakotas, Nebraska, Montana, and Wyoming) by bringing together research support professionals for an in-person convening focused on enhancing the practices, processes, and workforce of the region’s research enterprise. Like the project leadership team, project participants will represent diverse roles and types of institutions of higher education, including research-intensive, emerging research, primarily undergraduate, and tribal colleges and universities. The institutions and research support personnel who will participate in this project are committed to catalyzing regional transformation to overcome the challenges of staff recruitment, heavy workloads, and access to professional development opportunities.
The Northern Plains convening will create space for participants to develop a shared vision, consider possible strategies to address common challenges, identify how strengths can be emulated or shared, and will provide the opportunity to chart a course for future collaboration that includes shifting mindsets away from serving individual institutional needs to supporting the regional research enterprise. The impact of the project will be realized through increased cooperation and resource sharing that will foster connection and mentorship between Northern Plains research support professionals. This will, in turn, promote relationship building between institutions and faculty and increase collaborative research activity across the region.