Cal Poly Humboldt
AC-9: Research and Scholarship

To assemble the data contained herein, the Office of Sustainability (OS) worked with Sponsored Programs Foundation (SPF) during the 2019 calendar year. In January 2019, this partnership launched a process by which SPF requested that each principal investigator (PI) complete a survey during their intake process that consisted of questions about their name, project title, brief project description and whether/to what degree their research was focused on or related to sustainability. SPF also sent the survey in March 2019 to principal investigators for work from the prior two years (2017, 2018- this was done in an attempt to assemble a complete data set for the reporting timeframe required by STARS of the previous three years). The OS was copied on all initial communication from SPF when the survey was emailed out to PI's. The OS then reviewed responses and based on results, assembled a starting data set. The OS followed up requesting information from unresponsive principal investigators in January 2020, but these follow up requests were only minimally successful. To assemble a full data set, the OS then reviewed an inventory listing all grant funded projects that SPF provided. The inventory was filtered to eliminate years prior or outside of the reporting timeframe, removed non-academic departments, and tagged projects not deemed to be research (these would ultimately stay in the attached inventory but corresponding principal investigators and departments for those projects not deemed to be "research" were not counted in the totals reported for this credit). Then the OS reviewed project documents on remaining projects to gather a one sentence description of the work. Based on this description, and sometimes additional project documents, sustainability research was identified by determining whether at least two of the three dimensions of sustainability were being examined in the research or the research questions. Projects in which interrelationships between two of the three dimensions of sustainability were examined were designated as sustainability related; projects in which interrelationships between all three of the dimensions of sustainability were examined were designated as sustainability focused. This was the same methodology used to designate courses. (The dimensions of sustainability are economy, society, and environment).

Non-academic researchers and departments were not included in the count given here.