Saturday - October 10th

Sunday - October 11th

Sunday - October 11th

8:30 AM - 9:30 AM

Research infrastructure is more than buildings and equipment, it encompasses the people, systems, tools, and processes that collectively enable researchers to move further, faster and without having to deal with administrative ballast. It includes research development professionals who assist building competitive proposals, sponsored programs staff who shepherd awards from submission to closeout, compliance officers who manage risk, core facility managers who keep shared instrumentation running, and the IT and data infrastructure that underlies modern science. Infrastructure decisions are among the most consequential a research leader makes, and they require navigation across the entire institution. A core facility without structure, a space reallocation that alienates a key faculty, or an equipment purchase that creates long-term maintenance debt can set a research enterprise back years, and so can losing a skilled grants manager or underfunding the compliance function until an audit forces the issue. In this session participants evaluate four competing infrastructure investment proposals, a shared core facility, a sponsored programs capacity expansion, a multi-institution equipment consortium, and a space reallocation, scoring each against strategic alignment, return on investment, faculty equity, and deferred maintenance risk. Each group includes a designated hostile questioner playing a skeptical institutional leader, who challenges the group's assumptions throughout deliberation and presents the recommendation at report-back. 

Learning Objectives:

• Evaluate competing research infrastructure proposals using a multi-criteria framework that integrates strategic alignment, financial sustainability, faculty equity, and long-term maintenance considerations.

• Articulate and defend investment recommendations to skeptical institutional stakeholders, anticipating the financial, political, and equity objections most likely to arise.

• Recognize the hidden costs and equity implications embedded in infrastructure decisions, including who benefits, who bears the risk, and what gets deferred.

• Navigate the relationship consequences of infrastructure decisions, including how to communicate a decision to a faculty champion or dean whose proposal was not selected.
• People, equipment, tools/IT, and then the process of managing all of it to support researchers in moving further faster.

9:30 AM - 10:30 AM

This session aims to prepare participants to understand the value and motivation behind institutions supporting growth of innovation and technology, including why/how institutions support start-up companies, licenses, and patents. Participants will receive information that  explains that Technology transfer offices (TTOs) in higher education institutions serve as the vital bridge between academic research and commercial marketplace application. Their primary function is to manage the institution's intellectual property (IP) portfolio, which begins with evaluating invention disclosures submitted by faculty and researchers to assess their commercial viability and patentability. Once potential is established, TTOs handle the legal and financial complexities of securing patents, copyrights, and trademarks. The office then actively markets these technologies to industry partners, negotiates licensing agreements, and manages ongoing royalty streams. Beyond traditional licensing, modern TTOs increasingly support campus entrepreneurship by facilitating the creation of university spin-offs, connecting researchers with venture capital, and navigating complex conflict-of-interest policies to ensure that academic discoveries are successfully transformed into public-facing products and economic development.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify and define core intellectual property (IP) types: Participants will receive an overview of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets, and connecting information relating it to all research administrators.

• Navigate the university invention disclosure process: Participants will be able to outline the journey of a technology from the initial lab discovery and submission of an invention disclosure form through the technology transfer office (TTO) evaluation phase.

• Analyze the primary pathways for commercialization: Participants will be able to contrast the mechanisms, benefits, and challenges of licensing university intellectual property to an established corporation versus launching a faculty- or student-led startup spin-off.

• Recognize and evaluate conflict of interest (COI) and ethical considerations: Participants will be able to identify potential conflicts of interest that arise when transitioning academic research to the commercial sector and describe the institutional policies used to manage them.

10:45 AM - 12:00 PM

This session equips leaders to harness data, analytics, and research informatics to drive evidence-based decision-making and strategic insight across the research enterprise. Participants will explore how core systems such as research administration platforms and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can be integrated to enable coordinated, data-driven operations and institutional oversight.

The session will examine the application of portfolio analytics, forecasting models, and research impact measures including bibliometrics and alternative metrics to inform strategy, evaluate performance, and communicate institutional value. It will also address the growing importance of data stewardship, with a focus on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, as well as the evolving role of artificial intelligence and automation in enhancing efficiency and decision support.

Emphasis will be placed on translating complex data into actionable insights and compelling narratives that support leadership decision-making, resource allocation, and institutional positioning. Panelists will discuss available tools, data governance frameworks, and approaches to leveraging analytics within both centralized and decentralized research administration structures.

Learning Objectives:

• Leverage research administration and ERP systems to support integrated, data-driven operations

• Apply portfolio analytics and forecasting models to inform strategic planning and resource allocation

• Use bibliometrics and alternative metrics to assess and communicate research impact

• Implement data stewardship best practices, including FAIR principles, to ensure data quality and usability

• Evaluate the role of AI and automation in enhancing research administration efficiency and insight

• Translate complex data into strategic insights and persuasive narratives for decision-making and stakeholder communication

12:00 PM - 12:30 PM

This Rapid-Fire session is designed to allow participants to ask specific and top of mind questions regarding any topic in research administration. The panelist will answer questions submitted virtually and or using the microphones in the room. No question is too complicated or too small, and all questions will be answered.  

1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Team management today seems more difficult than ever before. Leaders have the responsibility of not just managing the internal environment, but team members look at them to put external environmental and world events into perspective. As leaders it is important to attempt to be effective at team management, while leading compassionately, it is also equally important to hold firm on the foundation of management and the areas for which you have some influence over. Some clear components that will be highlighted during this session include:

·       Defining clear roles and responsibilities for each team member, including how you can maximize the impacts.

·       Fostering open communication to encourage collaboration and feedback.

·       Promoting a positive team culture that values diversity of thought; and maximizes the input from all team members.

·       Setting measurable goals and regularly assessing your team's performance; while sharing your professional performance goals and metrics with your team.

·       Using structured hiring processes to evaluate candidates fairly and constantly making objective decisions.

·       Prioritizing cultural fit alongside skills and experience during hiring and promoting new team members.

 

Learning Objectives:

  • Discuss critical hard and soft skills necessary to lead intelligent teams today.
  • Explore specific qualities of team members that help bolster your team’s effectiveness.
  • Analyze leadership strengths and blind spots related to team building and cultivation.

2:30 PM - 3:30 PM

Faculty are among the most autonomous professionals in any organization. The relationships research leaders build, or fail to build, before a moment of resistance largely determine whether influence is possible at all. This session covers why the most common tools (compliance pressure, financial incentives, prestige appeals) reliably fail with faculty, and what replaces them: a foundation of trust and credibility established through consistent presence, follow-through, and genuine investment in faculty success. Participants learn to distinguish between influence actions that are within their control and those that depend on conditions they cannot create. We will apply three influence levers to two faculty profiles: a mid-career PI whose research identity has been fractured by grant failure, and a high-performing star PI whose success casts a shadow on junior colleagues. Groups develop a concrete 90-day engagement approach for each person, followed by a debrief focused on what actually changes behavior versus what merely satisfies an administrative impulse to act.

Learning Objectives:

• Determine what drives and inhibits faculty engagement, distinguishing surface behaviors from the underlying motivational conditions that produce them.

• Recognize the role of relationships and trust as the precondition for influence and identify concrete practices for building credibility with faculty and college leadership before a moment of resistance arises.

• Distinguish between actionable influence strategies, those within the research leader's direct control, and unactionable ones that depend on conditions or changes the leader cannot create.

• Distinguish between compliance-generating approaches and motivation-generating approaches and identify which they are currently using with key faculty stakeholders.

• Select and deploy the appropriate influence lever based on a diagnosis of the individual's motivational state and relational context.

• Design a concrete engagement strategy for faculty who are disengaged or resistant, calibrated to the individual rather than the role.

• Articulate the difference between influence approaches that produce lasting behavioral change and those that merely satisfy an administrative impulse to act.

3:30 PM - 4:30 PM

The skills that propel high-achieving individuals into senior research leadership such as competitive drive, deep disciplinary identity, a track record built on personal accomplishment, are the same qualities that can quietly undermine their effectiveness once they get into the leadership position. This session addresses the dynamics that shape how research leaders make decisions, respond to challenge, and define success. The theoretical framing draws a distinction between the confidence that makes leaders effective and the defensiveness that makes them costly. Participants then engage in a reflective exercise. The session closes with a peer panel in which workshop chairs share choices that were right for the institution but personally costly, or alternately where they made a decision that was right for themselves but ultimately cost the institution. 

Learning Objectives:

• Articulate the distinction between productive confidence and self-driven defensiveness and recognize how the latter manifests in common research leadership contexts.

• Identify at least one pattern in their own leadership behavior where personal identity or self-protection has influenced or risks influencing institutional decision-making.

• Analyze the structural and relational conditions that make it easier for leaders to choose institutional good over personal visibility or credit.

• Apply peer-generated insight to develop a more intentional personal framework for navigating future situations where career interests and institutional mission are in tension.