Florida Gulf Coast University
AC-9: Research and Scholarship

To inventory the amount of faculty members and departments engaged with or conducting sustainability research, we used a non-probability, purposive sampling method. We sampled research from the following units for the 2015-16 fiscal year: 1) Research funded or supported by The Center for Sustainability & Education (CESE). 2) Research funded by the Office of Research & Graduate Studies (ORGS) and presented at Research Day 2016. 3) Research completed via the Whitaker Center for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education. The Center for Sustainability & Education, Whitaker Center for STEM Education, and the Office of Research & Sponsored Programs identified sustainability-related research falling under their purviews by using the STARS technical manual as a point of reference. The Environmental Health & Safety Department removed duplicate faculty members engaged in research through multiple offices to avoid double counting when calculating the amount of faculty members engaged with or conducting sustainability research out of the total amount of faculty engaging with or conducting any type of research. The research inventoried from the three aforementioned units enabled us to report on the total number of faculty engaged in sustainability research and the total number of departments with a faculty member conducting sustainability research. We defined 31 total academic departments (listed in the notes) in IC-3 and AC-1 of this STARS report because these units offer courses for credit. Academic departments offering courses for credit are not congruent with the departments that conduct research. For example, units such as Academic Affairs and Library Services appeared in the research that we sampled even though they do not offer courses for credit. Conversely, some departments that offer courses for credit did not have any faculty conducting research though ORGS, CESE, or Whitaker Center for STEM Education. In total 34 unique departments were a part of the research that we sampled and 25 of them had faculty engaged in sustainability research. Please see the attached inventory for further details.

Only the Faculty Member that gave the student a grade for the project and submitted the Research Day proposal on students’ behalf is listed on our inventory. In many instances, additional faculty advisors were involved with the research inventoried on the “Research Day” sheet of the attached Excel inventory. Unfortunately, there was no record of these additional faculty members available for this inventory. In instances where staff or faculty members were engaged in sustainability research on behalf of an office, center, or non-academic department, they were categorized to align with the departments reported in AC-3 as often as possible.