Abstract

Across all disciplines, advanced technology is needed for world-class research that can positively benefit society. At the same time, it is changing rapidly and becoming more expensive. For universities to maintain their ability to support their researchers with state-of-the-art equipment, they need to adopt new, collaborative approaches. At NYU, we strive to be the premier global research university driving discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurship. To achieve our goal, we need to fully leverage our internal strengths as well as create and maintain mutually beneficial collaborations with other institutions, including in the area of research technology. We will share our recent approaches to ensure the university’s research technology services, infrastructure, and staffing remain aligned with the institution’s strategic priorities, address researchers’ evolving needs, are incorporated into short- and long-term budget plans, and evolve with the rapidly changing landscape of research and technology.

In particular, we will share 1) an example of a cross-business unit coordinating committee responsible for aligning research technology budget requests with researcher needs and university priorities; 2) leveraging faculty and researcher governance to advance critical needs; 3) creating executive alignment for budget requests; and 4) examples of consortial efforts that NYU participates in and leverages to meet our growing research demands as economically and rapidly as possible.

In our presentation, we will include benefits to our research community, lessons learned that can be generalized to other universities, advice for building cross-unit, cross-institutional, and cross-sector relationships with trust, and communication strategies to engage researchers across disciplines and levels of technological complexity. Participants will leave with concrete examples for establishing similar complex collaborations.