Dear IHSI community,
In her Sunday message, Vice Chancellor Susan Martinis likened the past week of agency news to a challenging storm on the open sea. Keeping with this analogy, I’d like to offer that while we are navigating obstacles and responding to shifting winds, IHSI is also working to trim its sails and adjust its rudder to stay the course and keep heading in the right direction. Therefore, it seems the right time to share IHSI’s mission and map out the strategic directions that will help us move through this storm.
IHSI’s mission is to be the Illinois catalyst for interdisciplinary health research addressing personal, public, and planetary health challenges. Foundational to our mission is the advancement of health equity and the spirit of collaboration found throughout our research enterprise.
Below is a short list of some of the new directions we’ll be taking at IHSI to better align with our mission and position ourselves to achieve continued growth and impact.
- Building out our new affiliate program: We announced IHSI’s affiliate program in December 2024 as means to deepen collaborations and connections across campus and beyond. We look forward to engaging more with these affiliates and welcoming additional affiliates in 2025.
- More involvement in research projects with our affiliates: Forming stronger relationships with members of our research community will help build the capacity and expertise needed for increased health research success.
- Expansion of research administration and award management support: We have increased capacity and expertise for both pre- and post-award support, offering a better experience for researchers throughout the research cycle.
- Piloting research project coordination and management: IHSI, along with partners at AHS, LAS, Vet Med, and Beckman, have been finding new ways to meet the growing needs of research with human participants, including research coordination and management.
- Focus on partnerships and translation for greater impact: We seek to advance our partnerships and focus more substantially toward translation to ensure our campus research has real-world impact. Our participation with the ARPANET-H hubs and burgeoning partnerships with Mayo Clinic’s Advanced Diagnostics Laboratory, the Chicago Biomedical Consortium, UIC, Mayo Ventures, and others is evidence of a shift in this direction.
- Student programs as both exceptional learning experiences and drivers of research collaboration: IHSI offers three distinct undergraduate research experiences and a graduate fellowship program with Mayo Clinic. These programs provide students with real-world research experiences, offering opportunities for stronger collaborations between Illinois and partners at Mayo Clinic and Champaign-Urbana community organizations.
You will see some of these changes better reflected on our website through some menu reorganization and new content pages. Members of our leadership team also have adjusted titles to better align with their current portfolios. Across IHSI, we have focused our human health research activities into four main pillars: research education and experiential learning, research development, research support, and research translation.
We hope these changes help increase interdisciplinary collaboration and allow us to work effectively, together, towards shared goals across IHSI and with our affiliates and partners.
Sincerely,
Stephen Boppart, M.D., Ph.D.
Director, Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute