Designing an Academic Career for Impact

Welcome to my series entitled, “Designing an Academic Career for Impact”. In these articles I will share stories and experiences of building a multimillion-dollar research portfolio across two research centers and a wide variety of content areas, all the while continuing to teach, perform service, and getting tenured and promoted. The objective of these articles will be to convey tips, tricks, and pearls of wisdom I’ve often learned the hard way.

I spent many, many hours of my pre-tenure career agonizing over whether I was doing enough teaching, research, or service, while also feeling like I wasn’t making any impact in my community. Now that I have become fully “mid-career”, have revamped my research program multiple times, co-founded a research center and launched a research institute, and worked extensively with senior leaders as faculty senate chair through a controversial chancellor hire and the COVID-19 pandemic I want to help you to avoid some of this wasted time and energy, and make an impact faster.

No article will be more than 1500 words. This is not because there are no more than 1500 words worth sharing about these topics (there are entire books dedicated to some of them). Rather the purpose of the word limit is for me to pare down my thoughts to those that I think are most fundamental and useful. The second reason for the word limit is that I know you are all very busy with research, teaching, service, and (I hope) a life outside of work. By keeping it relatively short you can plough through these little articles in 5-10 minutes between your next meeting or class.

To the extent that it is pertinent, or available, the articles will provide additional freely available resources so that if there is a particular topic that you want to dive into more deeply you can. With that, “happy reading” and let me know what questions or topic ideas you have.