NSF Broader Impacts with Dr. Michael Thompson, "The Broader Impacts Guy"
Faculty Talk on the National Science Foundation (NSF) Broader Impacts
In 1997 the National Science Foundation (NSF) introduced the term broader impacts as one of its two criterion. However understanding what are broader impacts and how to do NSF broader impacts continues to be a topic of discussion between faculty, administrators, undergraduate students, graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and the greater community. During this discussion Dr. Thompson will provide an overview of broader impacts and the NSF broader impacts (BI) criterion of the past, present, and future, unveil the difference between understanding broader impacts and understanding how to successfully achieve the NSF BI criterion, provide better clarity of the NSF BI criterion by providing the core conceptual foundations and underpinnings of BI through the Research and Scholarship of Broader Impacts (SoBI), and then provide the practical applications for developing, choosing, implementing, and writing high-quality broader impacts for NSF proposals.
About the Facilitator: Dr. Michael Thompson is the Founding Director of the Broader Impacts in Research (BIR) organization for the University of Oklahoma. BIR seeks to help all faculty be more impactful and successful in their professional endeavors. BIR also serves as a point of contact to bring institutional and state-wide infrastructure as well as help others gain knowledge and get help in developing, implementing, and evaluating high quality broader impact programs and portfolios for and beyond Agency and National Science Foundation (NSF) Criterion. BIR Website: http://bir.ou.edu/. BIR is the first organization who provided and developed a research-based approach to broader impacts that increases a faculty’s chances of receiving an NSF award. BIR is the first to develop a University-wide evaluation system to determine faculty Return on Investment (ROI) through help by an impact organization. Faculty who followed the BIR research-based approach and let BIR review their NSF BI in their proposals averaged a Year-Over-Year (YOY) higher – (4% compared to competitive award) and (6% compared to research grant award) NSF funding rate.
In this position Dr. Thompson also advocates for the Scholarship of Broader Impacts (SoBI), conducts research in broader impacts, and Academic Research Impact (ARI). Which allows his organization to model, develop, implement, and evaluate broader impacts by coming up with answers to questions like - (1) what does broader impacts look like on a university, local, regional, global, and international scale and (2) how can you create and implement meaningful faculty professional development that helps all faculty to be more impactful and successful in every aspect of their professional careers? In 2015, Dr. Thompson also served on the National Alliance for Broader Impacts (NABI) Working Group, which developed the Broader Impacts Guiding Principles and Questions for National Science Foundation Proposals. This is a nationally vetted and used document.
RSVP here or contact bridget1@tulane.edu for more information.
