Excellence to Eminence

What Success Looks Like

ARC helps support eminence in research
Collaboration and Simplicity

By Rich Bowers

May 17, 2010

The business of doing research in today’s academic world is enormously complex – obtaining approvals on grant expenditures, certifying project effort, ensuring regulatory compliance, and other administrative tasks consume increasing effort and require constantly increasing knowledge.

Many department-, college-, and center-based professionals manage these ever-evolving requirements for Ohio State researchers, and work with the Office of Research to meet the administrative demands of Ohio State’s $700+ million research enterprise. In order to maintain our position as one of the nation’s leading research universities, this widely-dispersed group needs to work collaboratively to simplify and support our research programs.

Robert Killoren, associate vice president for research advancement, formed the Administrative Research Council (ARC) in 2008 to do just that. ARC’s message is simple…we all work for One University and we all want to fuel Ohio State’s rise to research eminence. By sharing our challenges and solutions, we can reach our goal of providing world-class support for world-class research.

The group, made up of more than 150 research professionals from all parts of the university, meets bi-monthly to share information and ideas, share best practices for navigating sponsor and federal requirements, collaborate to address university-wide research issues, and create new ways to overcome the challenges of increasing regulation and shrinking resources. This meeting of the minds has identified the need for new training programs such as principles of cost-sharing, created the newsletter ARC Notes to share information with researchers across campus, and formed workgroups to tackle pressing research issues. 

By serving as a collective voice, ARC supports the growth of Ohio State to eminence in research.

For more information, view ARC’s web site and working groups, and review past issues of ARC Notes.