Strengthening the Impact of Research (STIR) Program
The STIR Fellows program advances NC State’s mission of research excellence coupled with public engagement by equipping researchers to integrate effective broader impacts into their research programs.
The STIR Fellows program aims:
- To foster researchers’ broader impacts identities, helping them integrate their research trajectories with their personal values and society’s needs from the local to the global scale.
- To deepen researchers’ capacities to design, implement and assess broader impacts work.
- To advance researchers’ broader impacts networks, connecting them with those at NC State who can help them imagine, implement and extend their broader impacts work.
- To promote across NC State a culture that values, supports, and rewards broader impacts and achieves inclusiveness in research.
The Strengthening The Impact of Research (STIR) program seeks to enhance NC State’s capacity to design and conduct research with broad impacts on society by creating and supporting yearly cohorts of NC State Impact Scholars.
Each group of 10-12 selected Impact Scholars will attend a series of five, 2 hour workshops in the spring to strengthen their capacity to create innovative research impacts on society and write more competitive grant proposals. Impact Scholars will also design and implement a project of their own, and conduct a Research Impacts workshop in their department.
With support from the Office of Outreach and Engagement, Impact Scholars will receive up to $1,000 to support their project expenses.
Participation is open to NC State faculty, postdocs, and research staff who engage in research and want to strengthen the impact of their scholarship. We anticipate selecting Impact Scholars from different colleges as well as different phases in their careers. We will strive to recruit and select a diverse group across disciplines, departments, colleges, career stages, race, and gender. The selection process will also seek to identify participants who have their own initial ideas and plans regarding research broader impacts and are, at the same time, open-minded about ways to improve their work.
Impact Scholars will be selected to be a diverse set of researchers who have potential to make significant impacts on society and the world through their research and developing a broader impacts identity, with preference given for the following criteria:
- Commitment to societal impacts of research
- Focused, clearly expressed need for capacity development
- Contribution to diversity