Throughout this academic year, I will be using this Initiatives column to share parts of the college’s strategic plan. My goal is to help you understand the goals and how we aim to reach them, and to help you see yourself in the plan as someone who can not only help to implement it, but also can benefit from it.

This week’s initiatives column will focus on the third action item of goal 3: Research addressing social issues, objective 4: supporting research for change, in our strategic plan for 2021-25. You can read the full plan on our website.

This objective calls on us to coordinate existing resources and enhance current mechanisms to increase our capacity to procure external funding for research activities.

The third action item calls on us to improve the functionality of college and University spaces to support research.

There are three implementation tasks associated with this action item:

• Leverage existing College of Education spaces (e.g., Krause Center, mathematics lab, science wing) to increase the likelihood of securing funded research grants.
• Establish the Herr clinic as a research space in the study of educational, assessment and counseling practices that promote mental health and well-being.
• Identify other University spaces at University Park (e.g., Knowledge Commons, Millennium Science Complex) and across Commonwealth Campuses (e.g., Hershey Medical Center, Plastics Processing Laboratory at Penn State Behrend, Pullo Family Performing Arts Center at Penn State York) to support research projects.

We have been very intentional about leveraging our resources to improve the functionality of our spaces. We have been increasing the uses of our existing spaces for research purposes, and this summer we will be transforming the second floor of Rackley Building into a research hub. We expect that by the start of fall semester, the area will feature upgraded workspaces and conference rooms to facilitate research collaboration. Although the space will be located in Rackley Building, the conference rooms and other collaborative spaces will be available to everyone in the college.

I welcome ideas from you about additional ways to achieve this action item.

Coming up

The next Initiatives column will include a look at goal 4, objective 1.