EAGER Germination: Aligning Stakeholders and Structures to Enable Risk Taking (ASSERT)

This award will create a community at Boise State University to germinate transformative research ideas and questions to address critical societal needs by Aligning Stakeholders and Structures to Enable Risk Taking (ASSERT). This community will germinate, cultivate, and celebrate transformative research ideas and questions among all academic ranks. This will be achieved by improving the academic structures, addressing the cultural issues at the university that inhibit academic risk taking, and supporting the personal development of individual faculty to facilitate their readiness to conceive transformative research ideas. ASSERT will encourage and coach faculty to take risks in order to tackle large societal issues in their research. The plan includes three components aimed at creating an ASSERTive community: (a) create a learning framework for a cohort of faculty who are at various stages of their careers and who are in danger of not taking risks in their research strategies for a spectrum of reasons; (b) address the structural and cultural issues at the university in order to create a more nurturing environment that encourages faculty to take strategic intellectual risks in their research; and (c) work on a sustainability plan within Boise State that expands the program to other research teams while also creating guides for other universities.

This project will enable necessary conversations about university policies (such as tenure and promotion, funding of student research, and rewarding team science and intellectual risk taking) to the forefront at Boise State. It will have an immediate impact on the research environment and infrastructure on campus, at all levels. Students will have access to projects that cross disciplines and will be led by intellectually vibrant mentors. This will create a pathway to a future of researchers who are excited and inspired about doing science. By addressing the culture within the academic departments and the personal development of the participants through retreats, workshops, and one-on-one coaching, this project will be creating a community of faculty who are willing to tackle large societal questions in their research portfolios.