University of New Hampshire
AC-10: Support for Sustainability Research

UNH holds a deep commitment to Interdisciplinarity research and academic excellence to address issues facing UNH, our state, region, and beyond. One of the University's four Strategic Priorities is “expanding academic and research excellence to attract increasingly strong and diverse students and faculty from across the country and abroad. The university will be known and respected for the high caliber of teaching, research and advising in its academic programs. Its distinguished research, scholarship and doctoral education will be recognized worldwide, including its contributions to global sustainability challenges.” 

UNH’s commitment to sustainability research is supported through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary units such as the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS); the School of Marine Sciences and Ocean Engineering; the Sustainability Institute; and the Carsey School of Public Policy, as well as through funding opportunities such as the the Collaborative Research Excellence (CoRE) Initiative. 

Specific faculty resources and incentives include:

1) The UNH Sustainability Awards: In 2021, the UNH Sustainability Awards was launched to recognize sustainability efforts by UNH faculty, staff, students, and alumni. The program seeks to celebrate and incentivize research and scholarship, curriculum development and teaching, campus initiatives and culture, and external engagement activities and achievements that best embody the principles and practices of sustainability. The total number of awards granted is not predetermined and is based on the caliber of the submissions. The Sustainability Institute coordinates the program. Between 2021 and 2023, more than 150 faculty, staff, students, and alumni received an award. All awardees are celebrated at an annual recognition ceremony. Awardees receive a certificate of recognition and are featured on the Sustainability Institute website. 

Sustainability Awards’ nominees were eligible to request a financial incentive award of up to $2,500 to extend their work over the following year. Awardees included faculty members, who used the funding to support their research efforts, including presenting at conferences, conducting field research nationally and internationally, and purchasing equipment or other services needed to conduct research.

2) The Research and Engagement Academy is a faculty development program, designed to enhance faculty success in outreach scholarship within the disciplines. At UNH, engaged scholarship is a mutually-beneficial collaboration between the university and external partners for the purpose of generating and applying relevant knowledge to directly benefit the public. The Academy supports faculty who are developing and engaging in mutually beneficial collaborations with external partners. The Academy's goal is to identify, mentor, and work with faculty from across the institution who are interested in Outreach Scholarship and increase their success in receiving funding for their work.. The principles of Outreach Scholarship (research in service of society, collaboration with external partners, etc.) blend very well with those of sustainability, and much research fostered by the Academy is related to sustainability. 

3)  UNH Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Research, Economic Engagement and Outreach: The office is guided by values of stewardship, creativity, quality, acccountability, well-being, inclusion, and works to drive opportunity for UNH researchers.

4) Office of Large Center Development: The Office supports collaborative research activities to expand UNH’s capacity to pursue major multi- and interdisciplinary research initiatives that garner national and international recognition by providing a range of services including:

• Connect UNH researchers intellectually and develop strategic alliances,
• Guide the pursuit of new strategic research activities in response to the funding opportunity landscape and new research directions,
• Coordinate large and complex grant and contract proposal efforts,
• Implement Collaborative Research Excellence Initiative (CoRE). 

The Collaborative Research Excellence (CoRE) initiative is an annual internal funding competition to support interdisciplinary collaborations across UNH.  CoRE projects have engaged moe than 3,000 participants from academia, industry, and the community and stimulated over $35M in additional external funding to support world-class research and scholarship aimed at solving global problems. CoRE is funded through the Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Research, Economic Engagement, and Outreach. 

5) The Sustainability Institute supports faculty through a range of programing focused on sustainability challenges as well as through two professorships focused on the climate crisis and sustainable food systems: https://www.unh.edu/sustainability/research  

6) The UNH Carsey School of Public Policy supports faculty in conducting research on i rural communities, families and development: https://carsey.unh.edu/ 

UNH holds a deep commitment to interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary research and its four strategic priorities weave this commitment together through, for example, ensuring

• that all students are engaged and ethical global citizens
• that its research, scholarship, and doctoral education are “recognized worldwide including contribute to global sustainability challenges
• UNH will build collaborations that support New Hampshire’s economy and quality of life, sustainability and resilience and will be a trusted, valuable and consistent partner.
• Building financial strength including sustainable investing and becoming more accessible and affordable for students.

It also includes Sustainability as one of its 9 metrics to track progress on its strategic priorities to assesses our education, research and practices in supporting environmental, fiscal and social responsibility and uses its STARS score as the metric: https://www.unh.edu/main/future-of-unh

All UNH Colleges give positive recognition of interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching with regards to appointments, tenure, and promotion. For example,

•  The College of Health and Human Services states that “Applied research undertaken by our faculty and staff reaches across disciplines and affects communities and schools, providers of healthcare and human services, and researchers around the world. UNH research creates new knowledge for understanding and dealing with long-term care policy, adolescent and child development, cardiac rehabilitation, suicide prevention, and other issues of critical importance to communities.”
• The College of Life Sciences and Agriculture P&T guidelines state that “we will nurture creativity and provide an environment that fosters rigorous scientific inquiry and actively engaged learning in an interdisciplinary environment.”

Here are some addtional examples of language from various UNH departmental policies on research and academic values and promotion and tenure criteria:

• Department of Political Sciences states: “Highly effective scholarship is a necessary condition for satisfactory performance towards tenure. Research and publication activities within the discipline or related interdisciplinary areas represent a major component of the evaluation of faculty performance within the Department of Political Science. As faculty progress, they are required to demonstrate continued scholarly progress with a coherent agenda for further research. The Department encourages collaboration; however, the candidate must provide documentation of a significant and original contribution to such endeavors. Fundamental scholarship activities include engaging in disciplinary or cross disciplinary research projects, the product of which is formally shared with others and is subject to review.
• Department of Classics, Humanities, and Italian Studies states: “The department recognizes that the fields of Classics, Humanities, and Italian Studies encompass areas including, but not limited to, Literary History and Criticism, Literary Theory, Pedagogy, Technology and Media, Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Translation, Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Philology, and other interdisciplinary fields, regardless of the medium in which they are presented.” 
  
• The Natural Resources and the Environment Department document states: “Expectations of research output must be flexible and geared towards an evaluation process that recognizes differences in research specialty areas, including interdisciplinary research or that which focuses on applied problem solving.”
• The Department of Biological Sciences document similarly states: “Assessment of research productivity must be flexible to recognize difference in specialty areas, including interdisciplinary research or theoretical or applied problem solving.”
  
• Computer Science states: “Interdisciplinary collaborations are valued, and the department will solicit appropriate input to evaluate the interdisciplinary contribution of the candidate as part of the promotion and tenure process.”
• Earth Sciences states: “Both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research is valued,” and that “Faculty members may also be engaged in scholarship activities in which they apply their expertise to address specific societal issues in the earth and environmental sciences.

Over the past 5 years, the library has introduced the concept of sustainability in library collections to the UNH campus. This effort has included educating our community about unchecked inflation in the pricing of library materials from commercial publishers, and the mismatch between stagnating library budgets and growing campus needs for a wide array of research materials across subjects, disciplines, and format. In our quest for sustainable collecting, we’re exploring alternative content delivery models and advocating more strongly for the development of robust open access publishing options. The library has shifted from a general research support model to embedded subject librarianship, where librarians have the deep discipline expertise necessary to support the collecting, instruction, and research needs of campus programs. With more in depth of knowledge about the domains in which they are engaged, the librarians are better able to collaborate with one another on supporting interdisciplinary inquiry, and can better advise faculty and students on undertaking research that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries.

The Library Sustainability Resource Guide is at: http://libraryguides.unh.edu/sustainabilty

The website URL where information about the programs or initiatives is available:
http://unh.edu/undergrad-research/programs 

The library has research specialists in the areas of research data management, data reuse, data sharing, academic publishing, evaluation metrics, and alternative publishing models, and promotes open access publishing and open science in the UNH community.

Related links:

https://libraryguides.unh.edu/datamanagement 
https://libraryguides.unh.edu/openaccess 
Example presentation: https://scholars.unh.edu/library_pub/125/
Library guide to Sustainable Business: https://libraryguides.unh.edu/changemaker/library 

The Research landing page at UNH provides numerous resources regarding research:
http://www.unh.edu/main/research/

http://libraryguides.unh.edu
http://libraryguides.unh.edu/sustainabilty