Research That Resonates: Aligning Academic Incentives with Social Impact

Researchers can foster tangible impact outcomes within communities and broader society in many ways. Dr. Priyanka Brunese from Saath Partners will introduce the research-impact value chain, help unpack different pathways to foster impact, and discuss several barriers within academia that inhibit faculty to pursue research for the purpose of broader societal impact. For example, how might traditional incentive structures emphasizing criteria such as publication and journal impact factors be misaligned with collaborative research approaches, such as community-engaged research that require trust and partnership-building activities for long-term impact. This work may not be recognized or rewarded, so how do we reconcile these tensions? In the second part of this discussion, we will look at one example of how university administrators can reward and incentivize a broader range of research-impact activities without “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. Dr. Michael Doughtery, Dept Chair of Psychology at UMD, will introduce the DORA Research Assessment framework and share the motivations, benefits, and challenges of implementing expanded reward structures within the department. This webinar is intended for researchers at any stage of their career who are interested in learning more about pathways to increase community impact from research as well as university leadership and administrators who are curious about better incentivizing and rewarding this work. Community partners interested in collaborating with researchers are encouraged to join. We’ll leave plenty of time for discussion and Q&A.

Panelists:

Michael Dougherty is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland, where he has led a multi-year effort to overhaul his department's hiring, annual review, and tenure and promotion policies to better support and incentivize trustworthy, reproducible, transparent, and societally impactful research. In addition to this effort, he has been engaged in various national efforts to effectuate change in academic incentive systems across higher education, efforts for which he was recognized as a 2024 recipient of the NINDS Rigor Champion Prize. He currently serves as a UMD representative on the Higher Education Leadership Initiative on Open Science (HELIOS), where he is also on the advisory council.

Priyanka Brunese is a seasoned pracademic with over 15 years of experience in fostering cross-sector partnerships, driving sustainable impact through evidence-based solutions in both academic and practice settings. Specializing in systems thinking, applied research, participatory evaluation methods and multi-stakeholder collaboration, she founded Saath Partners to help organizations catalyze impact through research, collaboration, and innovation.