Dear Faculty Members, Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Fellows,
When President Hartzell introduced our university’s new strategic direction, we made a collective commitment to become the world’s highest-impact public university and achieve our goals through long-term efforts in support of our people, place and pursuits. UT’s research mission — and our ability to change the world through innovation, scholarship and creative arts — is at the core of this aspiration.
But to maximize our impact on society and ensure that our world-class research community has what it needs to be the best, we must continue to build an infrastructure that supports scholarship in all its forms — across all disciplines.
Since Dan Jaffe was appointed vice president for research in 2016, he has made it his priority to expand the resources offered through the Office of the Vice President for Research while developing new ways to foster interdisciplinary collaboration. If STEM fields help us understand how the world works, he has said, then it’s the arts, humanities and creative fields that help us understand our place in it. One is often incomplete without the other.
It is in this spirit and in support of the university’s strategic vision that we are announcing today the renaming of the Office of the Vice President for Research. From today forward, it will be called the Office of the Vice President for Research, Scholarship and Creative Endeavors.
For those of you who have already worked closely with their staff — either by strategizing with the Research Development team or participating in one of their many transdisciplinary research initiatives — you probably know firsthand the breadth and depth of what they offer in support of bold ideas across campus. With new investments and additional personnel in support of the humanities and creative disciplines, the Office of the Vice President for Research, Scholarship and Creative Endeavors now offers many important programs and funding opportunities available to any principal investigator on campus:
Robert W. Hamilton Book Award: the most prestigious writing honor at UT. Founded in 1996 and underwritten by the OVPR and the UT Co-op, it awards one $10,000 grand prize and three runner-up prizes annually and is open to any faculty or staff member.
Co-op Research Excellence Awards: these annual awards are given for outstanding research and scholarship by faculty members or staff researchers. The career and best paper awards are open to scholars in any discipline, and the creative expression award recognizes achievement in more than 30 different specializations.
Research & Creative Grants: overhauled in 2017, the OVPR’s long-running seed-funding program’s criteria were revised to be more inclusive of non-STEM disciplines. Since relaunching the peer-reviewed program, 16 humanities and creative disciplines faculty have received seed grants totaling $160,000.
Book Subvention Grants: a program designed to assist faculty authors by covering the underwriting costs of scholarly monographs and books.
Bridging Barriers Grand Challenges: a campus-wide interdisciplinary research initiative founded in 2017 that includes more than 60 humanities and arts scholars, and two of the three grand challenges — Planet Texas 2050 and Good Systems — are currently chaired by College of Liberal Arts faculty.
Associate Professor Experimental (APX): a faculty retreat, facilitated by COFA’s School of Design and Creative Technologies faculty, that teaches newly tenured associate professors how to employ design thinking principles in research collaborations. To date, faculty teams have received nearly $1M to pursue project ideas sparked by APX.
OVPR-COLA Partnership to Support Scholarship in the Humanities: research support funds, overseen by the College of Liberal Arts, to help faculty cover lower-level project expenses.
I encourage you to explore these offerings and reach out to the Research Development team with questions or ideas, or to contact the office for additional support. The spaces and services they’ve designed are for you.
I want to thank UT leaders from across campus for their efforts and vision, which have brought us to this point today. I also want to acknowledge our community of talented, professional staff members from across UT who keep programs such as these running, day in and day out.
As President Hartzell said in his State of the University address last fall, “We clearly create impact through the education we provide our students. We also create impact through our research, scholarship and creative endeavors. We want UT to be known for work that changes the way the world thinks and lives.” Our strategic direction gives us a road map to further change the world, and it’s a vision we’ll realize by supporting the contributions of every discipline across the Forty Acres.
Sincerely,
Sharon L. Wood
Executive Vice President and Provost