Moving Toward Better-Defined Research Support Roles: Piloting Postdoctoral Training for Research Development

Research development (RD) is gaining recognition as an attractive career field, but navigating the variability of RD across universities can be difficult for prospective professionals. The growth of RD highlights the need to better characterize the distribution of RD duties and develop new paradigms for training RD professionals. We conducted a survey-based institutional case study of 123 research support staff at the University of Missouri (MU) from Nov. 3 to Dec. 15, 2023 to characterize the distribution of RD and research administration (RA) responsibilities across individual positions and units. Survey data showed a wide range of job titles associated with RA and RD duties, as well a majority of RA-intensive positions among survey respondents. We found a significant correlation (p=0.0032) between holding an advanced degree and the likelihood of a participant describing their job duties as more than 60% RD. When asked whether they intentionally chose a career in RD or RA, only 27% of participants selected either “Strongly Agree” or “Agree.” Our data describe the environment that produced an innovative postdoctoral training model for RD, which was launched in May 2023 at NextGen Precision Health, a biomedical research initiative at MU. We describe this training model, which may be helpful for universities interested in building an RD training program, as our model encourages the involvement of RD units and professionals across campus.