There’s Power in Partnership: How Two Higher Ed Institutions Are Pioneering AI Innovation in RA.

By Jason Cahoon, Nathan Wiggins, and Katie Gomez

The research enterprise is never static, and neither are the Research Administration (RA) offices that work to turn its gears. RA offices are always responding to shifting conditions in the field, such as developing compliance requirements and growth in their institutions’ research portfolios. Recently however, the bar for administrative bandwidth and adaptability has risen to unprecedented measures.

Across the United States, many RA offices are searching for innovative methods to keep pace and maintain compliance. Developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) introduce exciting possibilities for innovation in RA, but budget restraints, institutional inertia, and the limitations of commercially available AI tools present obstacles to leveraging these tools for RA workflows.

Through National Science Foundation funded AI4RA initiative, titled “Crossing the Innovation Valley of Death: Democratizing Data and Artificial Intelligence for Research Administration,” collaborators from the University of Idaho (U of I) and Southern Utah University (SUU) are teaming up to address these challenges by creating Al-powered tools designed for RA. While pioneering these AI solutions, merging perspectives from the RA offices of these two institutions has proven to be an essential step to creating AI tools that reliably integrate into various RA operations.

The AI4RA Initiative is built upon a vision where all RA organizations have access to AI augmentation. This vision is shared between Sarah Martonick and Sylvia Bradshaw, both of whom lead RA offices and serve as Principal Investigators on the AI4RA Initiative. Martonick is the Director of the Office of Sponsored Programs at the University of Idaho (U of I), an R1 institution that hosts a large research portfolio to meet its goals for innovation and community engagement. Bradshaw is the Executive Director of Sponsored Programs, Agreements, Research and Contracts (SPARC) at Southern Utah University (SUU), a Primarily Undergraduate Institution (PUI) that proudly centralizes its teaching and learning environment in its academic mission.

There are differences between the RA operations at U of I and SUU, as each of these RA organizations work to satisfy the mission and values of their respective institutions. Administering research portfolios at various scales present some differences between the challenges that these RA offices navigate, and navigating different challenges sometimes requires a different approach. As a result, Martonick, Bradshaw, and their respective teams operate in varied data handling environments, using different staffing strategies and handling processes to most effectively serve their institutions.  

Despite the differences between U of I, SUU, and the RA operations between them, the goals and challenges between these institutions are ultimately more similar than they are different. Most importantly, both U of I and SUU seek to provide students with transformative learning experiences while also facilitating research that serves our communities and develops academic knowledge. And while there are differences in the operations of their respective RA operations, both RA organizations at U of I and SUU stand to benefit from AI augmentation, as do various RA organizations across the research enterprise.

There is a lot to be said about the partnership between University of Idaho and SUU, and how this partnership has informed the development of flexible and reliable AI solutions. To dive deeper into this partnership and discuss its opportunities at length, we have exciting plans to release our first podcast episode on this topic. In this episode, Jason Cahoon, one of our AI Trail Blazer editors, will soon be interviewing Martonick and Bradshaw to discuss the power of this partnership at length.

As we prepare for our interview, we invite our readers to share what they want to know about this partnership and its part in creating flexible and reliable AI solutions. If you have questions that you would like to pose to Martonick and Bradshaw, we invite you to post your question in the comments section below. We will do our best to include our readers’ questions in our discussion.

To stay tuned on the release for this podcast episode, we encourage you to follow our AI4RA Newsletter. There you can stay informed on upcoming AI Trail Blazer content as well as other important updates related to the AI4RA Initiative.