Aligning Institutional Capacity and Incentives for Engaged Research and Public Impact

University institutional change efforts have increasingly focused on supporting, recognizing, and rewarding engaged research– processes by which policymakers, researchers, community leaders, and others work together to identify evidence needs, bring together different kinds of knowledge and expertise, and use evidence to accomplish shared goals – and other forms of societally impactful scholarship. Ongoing projects aimed at building institutional capacity for this work include aligning faculty hiring and promotion policies with the needs of engaged research, development of professional homes for the engaged research workforce, and innovations in metrics to assess research impact. Increasingly, a diverse generation of scholars is entering academia with hopes of affecting societal change, including through policy or community partnerships, and this movement to broaden institutional capacity meets the need to support and reward these scholars. A growing number of organizations are building national coalitions to understand institutional change efforts in this space and support universities in implementing promising models of supporting engaged and societally impactful research. This panel brings together representatives of several of those efforts, including an engaged scholar who has led institutional change efforts and is studying promising institutional change models, a representative of a national university association, and the principal investigator of a national coalition working to value societal impact in higher education. Panelists will discuss lessons learned from their efforts and promising opportunities for coordination across the academic ecosystem to drive progress. The panel is hosted by The Pew Charitable Trusts; Pew has convened the Transforming Evidence Funders Network, a cross-disciplinary network of research funders working together to address structural barriers for a more effective, equitable, and impactful research enterprise.