Strategic Goal 5
GOAL 5: Develop a strong faculty base with clear career paths and incentivized productivity
The success of the College in reaching its goals in education, research, and service will stem from the engagement, dedication and efficiency of its faculty in leveraging the vast pool of complementary expertise that exists throughout the University. To promote this engagement and collaboration, the College will foster the development of a strong faculty base, with the following specific objectives:
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Motivating the continued development of faculty in their selected career paths
The College will encourage and support the involvement of its faculty in activities that will enhance their capabilities in various areas, including excellence in teaching, research and community engagement. The College will help facilitate faculty interaction with granting agencies and research sponsors. The College will also incentivize mentorship of junior faculty members by successful senior faculty, and will promote the sharing of experiences and best practices amongst faculty.
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Proactively facilitate the retention of talented faculty and research staff and the recruitment of highly capable graduate students
The College will develop enhanced mechanisms to reward the success of faculty members in research, teaching, and community engagement. It will develop systems to facilitate the continuity of the support that is needed for research staff and graduate students. It will also coordinate and supplement the support the University Graduate School provides to the faculty in their efforts to recruit highly capable graduate students and research staff.
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Establish policies to reward excellence in faculty accomplishments
Effectiveness in securing research sponsorship will be rewarded through policies that will result in tangible benefits to faculty members who succeed in attracting significant funding and developing scholarly work. Full engagement of the research potential of the faculty will be promoted through policies such as a Research Supplement Program. Engagement will also be promoted by facilitating the re-investment of dividends from research into the support provided to faculty through mechanisms such as accessible (assignment) “buy-out” procedures, to enable research-oriented faculty to focus sharply and excel in research. Similarly, faculty accomplishments in the areas of teaching and community engagement will be rewarded to encourage faculty accomplishments in their selected career paths.
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Facilitate multi-investigator, multi-unit research
Innovative solutions to contemporary technical challenges are often found at the intersection of engineering sub-disciplines or in the overlapping areas of the sciences. The College will strive to remove administrative and implementation barriers that could hamper the multi-investigator or multi-unit collaborations that will be required to face the critical challenges in the future. Key elements of the effort will be the equitable recognition and credit given to the efforts of co-investigators in group projects and the assignment of faculty members to develop their research work in multi-disciplinary clusters.
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Foster a Discovery-to-Application Philosophy among faculty
In the best tradition of the true spirit of engineering (ingenuity), the College will promote among the faculty the aspiration to convert their successes in basic research to the realm of application and the development of end-user products, in association with industrial partners. To this end the College will facilitate the interaction and collaboration of its faculty with relevant industry and will support patenting efforts and the preservation of the intellectual property of its faculty. The College will also seek to take the best possible advantage of its location and resources to invite the involvement of relevant industry parties in joint ventures and long-term partnerships, such as those that would be solidified by the creation of a Research Park on the grounds of the FIU Engineering Center.
Message to College Stakeholders
Faculty, Staff, Students, Alumni, Advisory Council Members, Industry Liaisons, and Friends:
Please send us your comments on the College’s Draft Strategic Plan by September 20, 2010.
