One of Vice Chancellor Wakimoto’s takeaways from listening tours following his arrival at UCLA in June 2017, was that while UCLA was competitive with external funding opportunities, our campus did not offer the type of centralized services that were offered at other campuses in putting together large multi-disciplinary proposals. The campus is now assessing existing campus services in the context of various models employed at other campuses to develop an approach that fits UCLA’s needs and structure.
This initiative began in FY19.
The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research is currently in an exploratory phase for this project.
The project team, led by Mary Okino, is asked to review existing models of proposal development and support teams and recommend a staffing and operational model for implementation at UCLA, which allows for coordination with existing support systems.
A number of peer campuses offer more robust proposal development and support services. The services available for research teams at UCLA vary widely depending on departments, schools and even individual unit staffing. There is interest in providing more support to teams applying for high profile funding opportunities. The initial step is to explore existing campus models to develop recommendations for what services should be offered, what staffing is needed, how projects will be prioritized, and how the services will be evaluated.
A model that is of great interest is that used by Arizona Statue University (ASU). Faye Farmer from ASU visited UCLA in Fall 2018 to discuss how ASU approaches these functions.
