Foreword

When I was asked by the co-editors, who also are members of the NRMN Coordination Center, to write the foreword for Running a National Research Coordination Center: Lessons Learned from NRMN Phase II, I was absolutely delighted and honored to do so! I was on the steering committee where the coordination center staff presented their accomplishments, their planned long- and short-term activities, and any questions we could help address. From the beginning, I have been impressed with the work of the NRMN Coordination Center leaders and staff. They operated with exceptional organization, communication skills, thoughtfulness, and high regard for the projects they were coordinating. I strongly believed that their activities in coordinating the center should be written down and published so future leaders of coordination centers could learn from their exceedingly organized and thoughtful work.

As faculty, researchers, and professionals, we understand how much intellectual activity contributes to doing research; there are so many years of expertise that help us make the many decisions involved in the design, implementation, and writing of the results. What is often less understood is how much intellectual activity goes into coordinating the infrastructure that supports our research and related work. By how the chapter authors describe their work, it was evident that they engaged in purposeful activities—both within their teams and with the research project leaders they were coordinating—focusing on building trust, meeting project goals, and maintaining a culture of collaboration, feedback, and accountability. For example, in Chapter 2, McDaniels, Pfund, and Sorkness cite Rolland and colleagues, who describe the work of coordination centers as serving “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 for funding agencies” (Rolland et al., 2011). The organizational structures the NRMN Coordination Center team put in place to support the research project leaders were phenomenal and a tribute to their skills and abilities.

Any organizational administrator or leader could benefit from reading about the NRMN Coordination Center’s processes. The kind of organizational structures they implemented have implications not only for other future research projects but also for how researchers might have their work supported across institutions. At times, institutional support for particular research projects may wax and wane, but coordination centers like this one can serve as models for fostering areas of research that tend to fall through the cracks. The NRMN Coordination Center also modeled excellent mentoring while focusing on the task of building community for researchers working on mentoring. In a less organized and structured team, this may have resulted in an ouroboros—with the center eating its figurative tail—resulting in the center not providing enough support to the research project leaders who needed it. This team has repeatedly modeled good mentoring by being reflective of their previous experiences as researchers and what they might want to do differently for new research projects under their wings. A highlight of their effective work was the high value they placed on building community, which was a core feature of their activities and, as they note, key for sustaining research practices.

The NRMN Coordination Center had some of the best communication I have experienced in my more than 20 years in academia. Their email messages and other communications were targeted and well-organized. It was apparent they had clear strategies about meeting with research project leaders and how to accomplish broad goals, particularly in the middle of a pandemic. The team worked so effectively because they actively sought feedback and believed in collaborative structures. Because of this, they ensured collaboration and communication were key themes that flowed through the chapters in the book. In their discussions of sunsetting the work of the center in Chapter 8, Pfund, Ajamian, McDaniels, and Serrano discuss “tending to relationships,” which is something they have been careful to do all along.

I hope one thing people can take away from this book is that the NRMN Coordination Center team are effective leaders and administrators, and exceptional researchers. Part of what makes their work exceptional is their careful approach to technical, research-related tasks, while respecting the work of managing people—building trust, supporting agency, maintaining transparency in communication and decision-making, reflecting on their processes, and taking into account the needs of research project leaders. These represent best practices that vice presidents for research and other senior administrators at higher education institutions could benefit learning from. It was my pleasure to have a window into their process and see the project develop from the beginning. I hope you learn as much from them as I did.