Roadmap to Excellence 2018-2023


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Introduction
Initiative 1: Achieving excellence in undergraduate student advising and program quality.
Initiative 2: Growing our research enterprise in the service of science and Maine.
Initiative 3: Enhancing quality and impact of our graduate education programs.
Initiative 4: Rising to meet Maine’s health care needs.
Initiative 5: Accelerating facility renewal and modernization.
Initiative 6: Expanding our private and public fundraising efforts.
Initiative 7: Enhancing our culture of excellence: equity, inclusion and diversity.
Initiative 8: Communicating our impact to advance our success.
Initiative 9: Strengthening our support systems as the foundation for program excellence.
Appendix A: Blue Sky Plan Pathways
Appendix B: Listening Sessions
Commonly asked questions

Initiative 2: Growing our research enterprise in the service of science and Maine.

As Maine’s public research university, the University of Maine has the responsibility and opportunity to lead in research and scholarship.  We will sustain our distinctive dual focus on fundamental scientific discovery that expands knowledge across disciplines and the applied research that strengthens Maine’s economy and businesses, protects our environment, and improves human health and quality of life.  We will seek new funding sources from government, foundations, and industry sources to support these activities. We will educate students about research and scholarship to develop citizens better able to contribute to a statewide and global workforce. We will expand our stakeholder engagement using our current working relationships with the agricultural and forestry sectors as models. We will proactively support research infrastructure, activities that raise our units’ national and international profile, and early-career faculty mentoring. We will optimize centralized resources and continue to promote diversity in researchers and research activities.

Growing our research enterprise will better position our faculty and students to conduct science that transforms lives and informs decisions to create a brighter future for our state and world.  More effective, impactful, and visible research programs will attract exceptional faculty and students from across the country and the world.  Our faculty will have better tools and infrastructure to tackle more comprehensive, collaborative, and far-reaching problems than at present, buoyed by a substantial foundation of external stakeholder support.

Objectives:

  • Develop college research vision and mission statements that reflect and communicate the power of our disciplinary depth and breadth.
  • Facilitate cross-disciplinary research initiatives that leverage the diversity of expertise within the college to generate high-impact, societally-relevant projects.
  • Develop deeper stakeholder partnerships in the environmental fields.
  • Create a research mentoring system for early-career faculty to enhance their success and facilitate greater collaboration within the college.
  • Enact a system to promote and utilize sharable instrumental and human resources to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of existing infrastructure within the college.
  • In parallel with our health sciences initiative, develop the health sciences research portfolio with a focus on addressing Maine’s needs.