Overview
Boise State University’s goal is to be an R2 leader in translational research and be responsive to the economic and societal needs of our region and nation. The vision for our proposed Accelerating Research Translation (ART) program is to create and maintain a thriving, sustainable, and innovative translational research ecosystem. We capitalize on emerging momentum in two tracks that are poised for growth and investment: market-oriented and community-engaged TR.
Boise State will strategically invest in the overarching infrastructure, processes, and policies that serve both pathways, to increase institutional efficiencies, create a culture of faculty engagement, and generate a more diverse range of partners. We will update our institutions to make them more responsive to TR by carrying out the following six objectives:
- Develop administrative, data, communication, and collaboration infrastructure;
- deliver professional and mentoring development opportunities;
- establish an entrepreneurship ecosystem;
- strengthen collaborative relationships with community partners;
- build out the Office of Technology Transfer; and
- revise university-level promotion and tenure policies.
Boise State is uniquely positioned to reform key institutional processes to better serve the current needs of faculty, industry, and community. To initiate our STRP program, we selected two high-priority projects based on translational readiness, responsiveness to priority societal problems, strong partnerships, and training opportunities for postdocs and graduate students. Our leadership is committed to supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility by delivering program-building and policy reforms that support faculty, postdocs, and graduate students from underrepresented groups.
Intellectual Merit
Boise State proposes a multipronged approach to build institutional capacity for strengthening TR. Our theory of change recognizes the need for to generate both institutional and culture change in order to embed TR practices across the university. Our ART Ambassadors are at the heart of our approach, working as champions responsible for promoting program development, policy reform, and the reallocation of resources to support TR. To build new infrastructure and to change research culture, we combine top-down, bottom-up, and external-facing approaches.
ASU’s Global Center for Tech Transfer team will work with Boise State to identify promising areas of traction for TR, hindrances and roadblocks to a successful TR process, and university policies that encourage TR success. The partnership between Boise State and ASU involves a combination of macro-level analysis that will help us to frame our strategic planning as well as more peer-to-peer mentoring.
Broader Impacts
Boise State’s ART program will consolidate a set of institutional initiatives that will generate an institutional culture supportive of TR, foster the growth of an entrepreneurial ecosystem that incorporates university and industry, mobilize faculty expertise to support dialogue and evidence-based decision-making and create a robust network of partners so that following the formal end of the four-year ART program, we will become a leader among comprehensive, urban and public universities in TR.
Our ART program will solidify Boise State’s role as an economic engine and a public policy resource for the region and nation. By strengthening its institutional capacity, Boise State will be an active partner of new industries (semiconductors; bio-tech) that are rapidly expanding in the region as well as supporting government officials and NGOS to design collaborative solutions to pressing social, environmental, and policy problems.
Our program provides training for early career faculty, postdocs and graduate students, to help prepare the next generation of TR professionals. We will build the institutional capacity to support (1) market-oriented TR, which will contribute directly to the economic vitality region and nation as well as (2) community-engaged TR, which will contribute directly to the region and nation’s public policymaking processes. Boise State’s innovative policy context creates the ideal conditions to permit us to embed support for TR across the university.