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Mobilize for Impact!
Western is home to a diverse group of innovative researchers, scholars, and artists at all career and learning stages who advance and promote knowledge across the spectrum of fundamental and applied discovery, creative activity, and research creation. All are valued. All are critical to our mission and to the university’s role in society.
Collectively, we produce, preserve, and protect knowledge. We enhance culture, develop technologies, innovate, inform policy, train the next generation’s leaders, and help shape societies. We have impact within the academy, within our communities, and around the world.
Grounded in Western’s strategic plan, Towards Western at 150 , Mobilize for Impact! strives to capture the same energy and to accelerate our momentum. It guides the activities of Western Research, which are inextricably linked to the university’s mission to facilitate the production of research, scholarship, and creative activity.
This plan is Western Research’s commitment to our community, and it outlines how we will provide support, foster inclusiveness, advance collaboration, and facilitate, recognize, and celebrate success.
Mobilize for Impact! reflects not only what we are and where we have been, but what we can become – together.
The following four guiding principles are foundational to Western Research’s mandate and flow across all we do. These values and touchpoints guide us as we design and implement strategies and develop activities, services, programs, and relationships.
Catalyze Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity
Western Research will lead and partner on activities that support our community’s success and all the steps along the way. We will provide services and foster a culture of inclusivity that embraces, supports, and accelerates research, scholarship, and creative activity in all disciplines and at all career and learning stages. We will continue to provide, evaluate, and expand upon administrative and strategic supports and programs that enhance our scholars’ success.
Advance Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization
In collaboration with the Office of Indigenous Initiatives and the office of the Associate Vice-President (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion), Western Research will take proactive steps to extend equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization efforts in the academy and in related activities. We will ensure ethical research engagement with Indigenous communities; recognize colonial practices in, and adopt anti-colonial approaches to, research; and work with partners to advance equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization in all programs, services, and funding initiatives we support.
Balance Risks and Opportunities
Academic freedom is at the heart of university life and protected by the Faculty Collective Agreement. Respecting this core commitment, Western Research will be responsible stewards of knowledge, support open access initiatives, and help our community to safeguard research activities by protecting intellectual property and by ensuring compliance with regulations governing research, including national security guidelines for partnerships and the Tri-Agency research data management policy. Where appropriate, we will seek opportunities to advance the university’s research mission through high-risk, high-reward research.
Engage with Partners
London and Southwestern Ontario are home. By co-creating welcoming spaces, places, and activities that encourage partners to engage with Western’s research, scholarship, and creative activity, we will establish strong, ethical, and reciprocal partnerships on campus and with local and regional communities. As our collaborations, impact, and aspirations extend around the world – and beyond – we will also continue to nurture relationships, engage in mutually beneficial partnership development efforts, and share knowledge provincially, nationally, and internationally.
Ensuring Western’s research success is a shared responsibility, requiring close coordination and collaboration among many individuals and groups across campus.
Western Research is a key partner in this integrated and interconnected network of support that includes Associate Deans (Research), faculty-based research officers, Research Finance, Western Libraries, the School of Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies, Western International, and the Office of Indigenous Initiatives, among others.
Together, with campus and city-wide partners, Western Research will continue to inspire research success by providing a range of professional and strategic services and programs that help scholars reach their full potential at every stage – from a project’s conceptualization, through its development, implementation, and dissemination of outcomes.
We live in hyper-connected times. The relationships we form allow us to examine new viewpoints, identify needs, access research participants, find solutions, and connect the work we do to knowledge users. In short, strong
relationships facilitate success.
Western Research will support the development of ethical and reciprocal research relationships. We will work closely with colleagues on campus and with regional, national, and international partners to engage governments, health care, corporations and businesses, not-for-profits, community groups, and other academic partners.
It is important to extend the impact of our academic community’s work and to celebrate its successes. Western Research will increase support for knowledge exchange efforts – within the academy, private and public sectors, civil society, and arts communities. We also continue to lead and support nominations for prestigious awards and distinctions, and promote achievements to various audiences.
All researchers address challenges. Some of these challenges are grand.
Issues like systemic racism, sustainability, global health, socioeconomic inequality, threats to democracy, and climate change – as examples of grand challenges – require collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches because they require interdisciplinary and collaborative solutions.
Western Research will foster models of collaboration and interdisciplinarity that bring together top minds from within and outside the university. Research centres, groups, and institutes often play a vital role in these efforts. By working together, we can apply diverse perspectives and expertise to some of the most pressing challenges facing our world.
Having Greater Impact
Stimulating research, scholarship, and creative activity is a key area of focus identified within the Greater Impact theme of Towards Western at 150.
It is also at the heart of Western Research’s mission. Impact takes many forms – from individual scholars creating and promoting knowledge to collaborative teams developing novel technologies and solutions to grand challenges. From researchers influencing policy to artists creating culture and bringing joy to our lives. And from efforts to understand the fundamental questions that drive curiosity to knowledge that supports the development of our business, legal, health, and education systems.
As a key partner in this success, Western Research is committed to supporting, recognizing, and celebrating the full range of these efforts.
As administrative demands increase, we provide professional services, strategic guidance, support, and programs across a project’s lifespan – from inception to development, completion, and dissemination. These efforts allow our community to spend more time focusing on their research, scholarship, or creative activities – and having impact.