Introduction

Our vision for the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) Coordination Center was to provide the infrastructure needed to partner with the NRMN Resource Center and the 11 NRMN research teams to maximize knowledge generation around workforce development interventions. Collectively, the NRMN research community (coordination center, resource center, and 11 research teams) sought to understand which interventions work, for what populations, and under what conditions. Bringing together research teams with their diverse cultural experiences, perspectives, expertise, disciplines, and theoretical frameworks, we aimed to catalyze collaborations, generate new knowledge, and lay the groundwork for the next decade of mentorship research, professional development, and networking. Finally, we aimed to facilitate synergy across different disciplines, projects, data sets, and ideas to create a holistic perspective, contributing to the NRMN research community’s ability to shift the paradigm in biomedical research and workforce development.

The process of applying for funds to support a coordination center involves intentional planning and self-reflection on the part of the prospective coordination center leadership. In this chapter, we discuss our process for turning an idea into a coordination center grant proposal. First, we familiarized ourselves with the funder’s expectations for the coordination center and the coordination center literature to determine the degree to which we—as individuals, as a team, and as an institution—were positioned to successfully fulfill the roles and functions of a coordination center. Second, we considered critical partners who could support proposal development and, ultimately, the implementation of our coordination center work. Third, we identified the unique aims and scope of work for our coordination center, given our team’s foundations, resources, strengths, and demands that research coordination requires. Finally, we developed a plan to “hit the ground running” once we received the notice of grant award from the funding agency.

Roles of a Coordination Center

A coordination center can help researchers maximize collective impact in addressing critical transdisciplinary challenges (Kania & Kramer, 2011). A coordination center serves in a support role to offload administrative and other burdens from research teams, thus allowing project leaders and research teams to focus on innovating and increasing returns on investment from funding agencies (Rolland et al., 2011). While the specific roles of a coordination center may vary, most share a number of important functions (Blumenstein et al., 1995; Hohl et al., 2019; Rolland et al., 2011). Many of these functions align with the traditional roles of a collective impact backbone (DuBow et al., 2018). As mentioned in Chapter 1, we identified the NRMN Coordination Center’s two foundational roles – building community and synergizing research. While we will discuss these roles in more detail in further chapters, we provide a brief description of each below. We also provide a description of a third role – providing administrative leadership and infrastructure – that was critical during the early stages of proposal writing, planning, and implementation. Our team leveraged its experience across these roles in writing the grant proposal that ultimately funded the NRMN Coordination Center.

Role 1: Building Community

Coordination centers play a critical role in catalyzing and sustaining collaborations. This work involves convening different investigators and research teams to build trust, align expectations for shared and individual contributions, and build structures to support the achievement of cross-project goals. Through strategic and intentional leadership, a coordination center creates conditions for optimal research team outcomes by cultivating a shared vision, building organizational structure with clear tasks and norms of conduct, and providing opportunities for learning and professional development. These conditions enhance inter- and intra-organizational performance and effectiveness (J. Hackman & O’Connor, 2004; R. Hackman, 2002).

We were confident in our ability to successfully lead the NRMN Coordination Center because of our experience, including leading NRMN Phase I efforts, which included fostering collaboration, coordination, and community building across five research teams (Guerrero et al., 2017; Sorkness et al., 2017). In addition, members of our grant writing team served on the NRMN Phase I evaluation and research team and worked closely with other coordination centers, including the Diversity Program Consortium (DPC) Coordination and Evaluation Center (McCreath et al., 2017) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) INCLUDES Coordination Center (Amirkulova et al., 2024). Our team also had a proven track record of supporting several national communities of practice dedicated to mentorship across NIH-funded Clinical and Translational Research Centers (Llewellyn et al., 2020). To learn more about the NRMN Coordination Center’s community building functions, see Chapter 3, Chapter 6, and Chapter 8.

Role 2: Synergizing Research

Coordination centers play an important role in data management and the development of common measures, enabling individual research studies to answer interdisciplinary research questions while also providing support for protocol development, quality assurance, and statistical support functions (Blumenstein et al., 1995). In the case of the NRMN Coordination Center, we had expertise in the science of mentorship and database construction and management. During Phase I, our team was able to use its expertise to contribute to the development of the DPC Hallmarks of Success, an agreed-upon set of measures to evaluate DPC Phase I interventions (McCreath et al., 2017). Our team was also critical to the national data collection effort for the Mentor Training Core (MTC) in NRMN Phase I and for the ongoing work of the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER, www.cimerproject.org). These experiences formed the foundation for the NRMN Coordination Center team to undertake cross-project data coordination and analysis (Blumenstein et al., 1995). To learn more about the many tools and approaches the NRMN Coordination Center used to address data management and common measures, see Chapter 4, Chapter 5, and Chapter 7.

Role 3: Providing Administrative Leadership and Infrastructure

A coordination center should provide administrative leadership and infrastructure to ensure smooth and efficient operations and information management for the research community (Blumenstein et al., 1995; Hohl et al., 2019; Rolland et al., 2011). This might include the organization of documentation resources and tools like study templates, publication libraries, contacts and team membership information, important announcements related to funding requirements, style guides, best practice resources, lists of publication outlets, and data sharing agreements.

Through administrative leadership, coordination centers can help individual researchers and research teams traverse institutional and organizational policies and procedures, communicate and collaborate effectively during all phases of the research process, and share information and professional development opportunities. Administrative leadership includes the development, provision, and continuous improvement of a robust communications infrastructure for a research community. A robust communications infrastructure allows investigators to share ideas, resources, and updates on scientific research, and facilitates the sharing of research findings with a broader public.

Our team had a breadth of experience in dissemination, grants management, infrastructure development, and systems improvement. During NRMN Phase I, our team developed infrastructure for eight types of training programs that yielded seven curriculum products and expert facilitators who implemented training and served 9,925 participants nationally, fostering numerous collaborations. To learn more about the many tools and approaches the NRMN Coordination Center used to establish an effective infrastructure, see Chapter 3.

Critical Partners of a Coordination Center

It is critical to think about key internal and external partners when developing a proposal for and ultimately implementing a coordination center. Coordination centers are tasked with fostering a community of practice (CoP), which are groups of people informally bound together by shared experience and passion for a joint enterprise (Wenger & Snyder, 2000). One of the key functions of a successful coordination center is to build an inclusive CoP among individuals or teams. Establishing a functional CoP requires clear identification and deliberate inclusion of proximal and distal partnerships during the proposal and implementation stages. To achieve this, we described our network of partners using a concentric circle diagram, much like Bronfenbrenner’s nested environments (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) within which an individual’s development occurs. In our model, the NRMN Coordination Center, rather than the individual, served as the central entity, with its success and development over time dependent upon its interaction with different partners in our organizational ecosystem. This model allowed us to recognize partners with whom we would have frequent, direct, and proximal interactions, as well as more distal partners who might not be directly interacting with our coordination center but whose work might influence ours. Figure 3 provides a visual representation of this model of nested environments, which we chose to call tiers. The number of tiers we chose, in our case 4, was influenced by the funding structure of NRMN and the broader DPC. The number of tiers and the partners within each may vary depending on the coordination center’s aims, funding structure, and supporting communities and societies.

Tier 1: Coordination Center Team

Tier 1 includes the grant writing team during the proposal stage and the coordination center team during the implementation stage. Individuals may be selected for their experience in leading and managing projects, building community, and coordinating large datasets. These personnel might be located at one institution or multiple institutions and work within broader institutional and disciplinary environments. Project leaders should have experience assembling a team with the capacity to undertake the coordination center functions articulated earlier in this chapter. In our case, this group included investigators, data analysts, program managers, and community building experts from the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and the UW-Madison Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

Tier 2: Research Community

Tier 2 includes the research community the coordination center is serving. The research community includes everyone from principal investigators, co-investigators, research managers, project managers and coordinators, administrative support, and consultants. In our case, this included 246 individuals across 11 research teams, a resource center, and our coordination center. Sometimes during the proposal stage—as was the case with the NRMN Coordination Center—coordination center applicants are aware of principal investigators applying for research study funding. Coordination center applicants could use this knowledge to solicit informal feedback to help shape the coordination center proposal.

Tier 3: Collaborators

Tier 3 comprises collaborators and networks who are part of the same larger scientific effort as the coordination center. In our case, this included colleagues from the Diversity Program Consortium (DPC), including Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) and Coordination and Evaluation Center (CEC) colleagues, as well as program officers and project scientists from our funding agency. Additional collaborators in this tier may include coordination center steering committee and advisory board members, whose insights help shape the strategic direction of the coordination center; institutional leaders such as deans, provosts, and chancellors, who can advocate for local resources; and professional organizations or disciplinary societies, which can support the broader dissemination of findings. For an example of dissemination support by a society partner, see Chapter 8.

Tier 4: Public

Tier 4 includes the public, specifically anyone who may benefit from the research and scientific innovations resulting from the initiative. In our case, this included people who benefited from research on mentorship interventions, such as biomedical science educators, program administrators, policy makers, research mentees, and other research communities.

Identifying a Scope of Work and Specific Aims

Clear and compelling specific aims are foundational to a strong coordination center proposal (Santen et al., 2017). The proposal is where applicants have the opportunity to build clarity and excitement for reviewers. Once the coordination center proposal is funded, the specific aims are critical for “steering the ship”—providing markers for which activities fall within the scope of work and which do not. According to Santen and colleagues, strong specific aims are characterized by innovation, novelty, and plausibility (Santen et al., 2017). They address gaps in knowledge, are independent of one another, include clearly defined outcomes and feasible methods, and demonstrate a critical evaluation of the literature; all while being written in accessible, easy-to-understand language. Strong specific aims are aligned with both the funding agency call for proposals, as well as the coordination center literature that articulates how leadership regarding administration, data management, and collaboration are critical for successful coordination center implementation.

NRMN Coordination Center Specific Aims

Aim 1: Build and oversee the NRMN administrative team, the NRMN organization, and its communities of inclusive practice utilizing organizational best practice approaches.

Aim 2: Create the infrastructure to support substantial coordination, collection, storage, tracking, and reporting of all NRMN data, utilizing streamlined approaches.

Aim 3: Implement evidence-based, responsive communication strategies that will effectively and efficiently build communities of inclusive practice, foster synergy and research innovations, and disseminate NRMN key findings.

Our primary goal for the NRMN Coordination Center was to propel the contributions of individual research teams to a robust collective impact of the NRMN research community. Our specific aims reflect this goal and embrace the three roles described above of building community, synergizing research, and providing administrative leadership and infrastructure. For example, Aim 2 focused on creating and using an infrastructure to support substantial coordination, collection, storage, tracking, and reporting of all NRMN data. Our role of synergizing research is embedded in Aim 2 activities such as: facilitating data sharing through the development of templates for Institutional Review Board protocols, consent language, and data sharing agreements; establishing common measures; and managing various aspects of survey design and distribution. Similarly, our role of providing administrative leadership and infrastructure is reflected in Aim 1 and our role of building community is reflected in Aim 3. Together, these aims and activities supported the NRMN research community towards a greater collective impact.

Create a Plan to Hit the Ground Running

Once it looks like a coordination center will be funded, work can begin as feasible. In the case of the NRMN Coordination Center, we were able to use pre-award spending, which our institution supported, to intentionally set the stage for success. We developed lists of activities to undertake during the first few months. We conceptualized the core components of the infrastructure and developed task lists. We drafted templates of email correspondence and early presentations for NRMN research community members. We hosted NRMN Coordination Center (Tier 1) team meetings to enable members to get to know each other, build trust among members of the community, and create group norms and processes. One particular benefit to the NRMN Coordination Center was the opportunity for an in-person meeting with all 11 research team leaders (Tier 2) early in the process. Upon reflection, this was a significant factor contributing to the success of our NRMN Coordination Center. How we maximized this time together in-person and how the research CoP was launched is described in Chapter 3. Additional components of this early work are discussed in Chapter 4.

Conclusion

Setting the stage for a successful coordination center requires intentional planning, energy, and a thorough understanding of the surrounding ecosystem in which the research coordination will take place. During the application phase, coordination center leaders have a unique intellectual opportunity, not only to think about the goals of data coordination and research, but also the design of a CoP and the infrastructure needed to support it. An essential part of both the coordination center application and its implementation process involves understanding the funding agency’s desires for involving both proximal and distal partners. Finally, by creating clear specific aims that are aligned with the planned coordination center activities, the leadership team will have a set of markers that can guide the team’s ability to respond to emerging opportunities and challenges throughout the funding period.

We acknowledge Drs. Mica Estrada and Jenna Rogers for their significant roles in conceptualizing and writing the NRMN Coordination Center grant proposal and early implementation planning.