October 17, 2022

A message from Professor and Wooster Associate Director Doug Jackson-Smith

To our Research Community and Beyond,

During the search for our new SENR Director, we collectively had a good opportunity to talk about the structure of leadership in the School, in particular the roles of our Associate Directors. As one of the Associate Directors, I thought it might be useful to provide an overview of my role and to share my experience and reflections about how it fits into SENR’s collective work. 

When I arrived at The Ohio State University  in 2016, I did not expect to be taking on an administrative role right away. However, within a few months, Charles Goebel (who was the SENR Associate Director in Wooster at the time), was asked to step up as Interim Associate Dean for Research, and I was asked if I could step into his shoes. 

At that time, the Associate Director (AD) in Wooster was primarily asked to help run the Wooster SENR operation (supervise Wooster-based staff, help advise/mentor Wooster-based SENR faculty). The AD-Wooster also served as SENR’s representative on the “Wooster Associate Chairs/Director” leadership group, which meets with the campus leadership biweekly to discuss campus policies and administration.  

The Wooster Associate Director also met with the Director (Jeff) and the other Associate Director (Brian Slater, at the time) regularly to advise the Director on budgetary and policy matters and expected to provide leadership on research issues for the School, including taking charge of SENR OARDC project reporting and drafting CFAES impact statements. 

Over time, the role expanded as we decided to update our Pattern of Administration (POA) document to reconstitute and formalize the role of the SENR Research Committee (RC).  The Wooster Associate Director (myself) was given the responsibility of chairing that committee. 

According to that document, the RC is a SENR standing committee that is “responsible for providing leadership, guidance, and coordination of activities and policies related to the research and infrastructure (e.g., space, equipment) in the School, and advising the Director on issues related to these matters.  The Research Committee provides a forum for faculty groups to coordinate and plan research and research-related activities and helps to ensure the best utilization of current and future research-related resources.” The RC membership currently consists of myself (chair), Bill Peterman, Nick Basta, Robyn Wilson, Steve Matthews, and Kai Zhao. Dennis Wilt (the SENR Grants and Contracts Specialist serves as an ex officio member).   

Over the last three years, the RC has developed policies (that were then shared with and ratified by our full faculty) to guide our decision-making on a number of research topics.  Many of these were topics that were previously dealt with in a more ad hoc way (e.g., by discretionary decisions by the Director), and the development of formal policies designed to make these decisions more transparent and consistent. 

To date, new policies have been approved on a range of topics (these are available on enr@work here), including: 

• Procedures for external grant budget reviews that clarified role of our SGC Specialist, the college Grant Development Support Unit, and our Sponsored Programs Officer 
• F&A recovery and distribution (on external grants) 
• Release time recovery and distribution (on external grants) 
• Approving requests for new research scientist positions 

• Approving requests for new visiting scholars 

The RC was also asked by the Director to manage a budget for some types of research investments by SENR.  Strictly speaking, we do not spend money, but make recommendations to the Director about how we should allocate funds for: 

• Requests for matching funds on college equipment grants 
• Direct investments in SENR research infrastructure 
• Requests for SENR support for tuition and fee matches on external grants 

To give you a sense of our other work, we proposed and gained approval for a one-time investment of SENR funds to bridge the ‘stipend gap’ for faculty who had received grants that supported graduate students prior to the decision by the President at Ohio State to raise the minimum stipend for all GAs in 2020.  This past year, we have also been advising the Director on allocation of scarce research space in Kottman Hall, with the goal of ensuring equitable and productive use of our facilities. 

If you have questions or concerns on research topics, feel free to reach out to me at Jackson-smith.1@osu.edu!