October 31, 2015

Q&A with Dr. Kris A. Monahan, director of sponsored research

ChrisM_4_cmyk_resizedAs Providence College’s first director of sponsored research, Dr. Kris A. Monahan has helped professors secure more than $4.5 million in research funding since 2011 from 15 sources, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The money has made it possible for 30 professors to engage in research across all disciplines, assisted by undergraduate students.

Monahan has a doctorate in education from the University of Rhode Island and a master’s degree in public administration and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. Before joining PC, she worked at the Wellesley Centers for Women, the largest research institute in the world dedicated to gender studies, and as director of grants and sponsored projects at Bridgewater State University. She teaches Fundamentals of Research in Education in PC’s Graduate Education Program.

What does a director of sponsored research do?

My focus is to help find and manage funds and resources to support faculty scholarship. I work with faculty on identifying sponsors, submitting proposals, and managing grants. I help them present their ideas in a way that is fundable and to develop a research plan. We know that research is an essential tool for teaching, and at a primarily liberal arts institution like ours, students are an important part of research.

A lot of money is available for scientific research, but what about the liberal arts?

Often, liberal arts professors don’t need funding for big pieces of equipment or to pay research teams. What they need is time. They need smaller fellowships that free them to do research, or travel grants to look at documents in libraries.

In 2013, Ted Andrews (Dr. Edward E. Andrews ’01, associate professor of history) won a $6,000 Summer Stipend Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct research for two months at the University of Cambridge in England. It is an extremely prestigious award with a less than 9 percent success rate. Top institutions get this award. It wasn’t about the money — it was about having that presence among top scholars in the nation.

What’s new for faculty seeking research sponsors? 

Through the Phillips Memorial Library, faculty now have access to the Sponsored Project Information Network, SPIN, the world’s largest database of sponsored-funding opportunities, where they can create their own profiles. We offered training this fall for new faculty, who are very enthusiastic about it.

PHOTO BY ANGEL TUCKER

Creating new knowledge … and excitement

_MG_3582_cmyk_resized“Research is really dynamic,it’s constantly ebbing and flowing. I tell my research students all the time that 95 percent of everything that they are going to do in the lab will probably fail. But, it’s in learning from these failures and trying to find the elusive 5 percent that makes everything worthwhile. Sometimes we need to take two steps back in order to take one step forward. It’s experiencing this kind of success that actually makes it worth-while to go back and address a new problem with even more excitement.”

—Dr. Seann P. Mulcahy, assistant professor of chemistry

 

26_27_cc_sk2_resized“I use research to provide students with the science behind organizational behavior. For example, rather than just presenting how various personality traits impact an employee’s performance, my students take a Big 5 personality assessment to learn about their own personality and then we discuss what researchers have discovered about the links between certain traits and work outcomes such as performance. Some people believe that we should be able to intuit how to be a better leader or how to work more effectively as a group, but the truth is this takes hard work, self-reflection, and practice. Learning to apply best practices from research can speed up this process.”

—Dr. Deirdre G. Snyder, assistant professor of management