Center: Advancing Research Impacts in Society

The Center for Advancing Research Impact in Society (ARIS) will build capacity for research impact at the national, institutional, and individual levels and support research impact across academic, educational, governmental, corporate, and nonprofit institutions and agencies in the U.S. and beyond. ARIS promotes the progress of science by focusing on sustainable, mutually beneficial partnerships with Emerging Research Institutions (ERIs), Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs), and Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research jurisdictions (EPSCoR) to lower barriers to participation, build capacity for broader impacts (BI) work, and raise the capacity for research across diverse institutions. ARIS seeks to increase the scholarship of BI, advance the knowledge and understanding of BI, and diversify the BI landscape to create meaningful outcomes through three objectives: 1) Build capacity for societally impactful activities at the researcher and BI professional level; 2) Build capacity for BI support at the institutional level; and 3) Build capacity for wide-scale research impact in society at the national and international levels. The center will launch and test several online learning modules for BI professionals and researchers, as well as new impact infrastructure-building programs to support ERIs, MSIs, EPSCoR jurisdictions, and other organizations, and include a new program to foster institutional innovation and impact leadership at the national and international levels. This project will grow collaborative, responsive, applicable, co-produced scholarship of BI that informs practice, program, and policy– from how we think about and conceptualize impacts to how we create them and assess societal outcomes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.