Benchmarking Pitt RD Funding Information Ecosystem

Unit Description

Pitt’s Research Development (RD) team is in the process of redesigning the content and resources it provides to support faculty navigating the funding landscape. To guide a ‘refresh’ of our approach our team revisited a benchmarking exercise to compare how the Pitt RD funding information ecosystem compares with other R1 institutions. We furthered the effort to further expand the representation of humanities and social sciences by factoring in additional, aspirational peers. This will inform an overhaul of our ‘Find Funding’ web pages. As part of a centrally based office serving an institution-wide audience, it is essential to structure and deliver content in a consistent manner that facilitates discoverability and usability. In an effort to also make possible serendipity we aim to make connections across themes to further serve others’ goals of realizing an independent scholarly agenda.

Eligibility

DSAS Humanities Ph.D. students with no university academic appointment in summer 2022 (TA/TF/GSA/GSR/other full summer funding) or external fellowship and who expect to be enrolled in fall 2022. 

Stipend

$3,000 for ca. 150 hours of effort in summer 2022

Internship Project Overview

What the internship will look like: a 10-week project to deliver web content that makes our funding information appealing to Pitt audiences and aspirational for other universities. A work plan looks like:

• W1: Intro to Research Development, our benchmarking, and some time to integrate into the team
• W2: Validating the benchmarking, and an opportunity to add additional ideas
• W3-4: Prioritized funder-specific resources (e.g., National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities)
• W5-6: Thematic resources (e.g., early career faculty, arts & humanities, philanthropic funding)
• W7: Additional funders
• W8: Review & Revise 1
• W9: Present to Pitt Research leadership
• W10: Review & Revise 2

Qualifications

Skills oriented to in this experience:

• Benchmarking
• Information architecture
• Communicating generally with expert audiences
• Web design
• Communications.

Host Unit Mentor

Ryan Champagne is Assistant Director for Research Development at the University of Pittsburgh. Mr. Champagne joined the Office of Sponsored Programs in 2015 as the inaugural staff for Pitt’s RD team after having completing advanced studies and research work in Library & Information Sciences from the University of Pittsburgh where he had completed his master’s in the field in 2013. He completed dual bachelor’s degrees- Journalism and French- in 2000 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has continued professional growth as a LUMA Human-Centered Design (HCD) Practitioner (2018) and now a LUMA HCD Facilitator (2022).

Mr. Champagne values the roles that cultural institutions serve as spaces for learning, partnering, collaborating, playing, informing, and advocating in our cities. He loves music enough to have braved that industry at a time when the moral panics of streaming technologies had yet to give rise to new business model- the iPod was new- and still calls himself a ‘fan.’  

Application

See here for terms and application instructions.