Carleton College will serve as the lead institution on an NSF Conference grant (#2324524) for the Colleges of Liberal Arts Sponsored Programs (CLASP) Community of Practice, a free and open resource that currently represents more than 330 predominantly undergraduate institutions, particularly institutions that fit within the liberal arts college framework (PUI LACs), across the nation. Charlotte Whited, Associate Director of the Grants Office and Compliance Officer, will serve as the project’s Principal Investigator, leading a team of research administration professionals from a variety of PUI LACs.
Funded by NSF’s Growing Research Access for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity (GRANTED) initiative, CLASP will partner with the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton to survey and convene the CLASP membership, to develop tools and scalable models for advancing research at PUI LACs, broaden participation within the community to support the needs of organizations such as minority-serving institutions, and reduce systemic barriers to accessing information about and from external funders. Throughout the project, sponsored research professionals will develop strategies for building the capacity and effectiveness of research administration across a diverse range of institutions; build protocols that improve outreach to, and support for, institutions that serve significant numbers of students underrepresented in the sciences; and create procedures for representing and advocating for the research contributions of this subset of Emerging Research Institutions. Findings from this project will provide early insight into how to increase partnership, knowledge sharing, and enhance communication between research administrators at PUI LACs of all sizes and types.