The Provost’s Catalyst Program is a new university-wide effort designed to provide additional resources to faculty across Tufts as they generate novel scholarship and pathbreaking research. As part of the university’s commitment to support the success of its faculty, the program was launched last academic year as a pilot initiative with a targeted group. Ultimately, the program aims to offer support across three categories of faculty: early career, mid-career, and established.
Specifically, the program supports extraordinary faculty with a demonstrated record of developing transformative solutions to national and global challenges, sustaining a research program with an emphasis on interdisciplinary and translational research, teaching both undergraduate and graduate students, and being highly active and recognized nationally and internationally in their discipline.
Referred to as Provost Catalyst Leaders by this initiative, these faculty members receive a combination of funding and other support from the Provost’s Office, for a defined period of time. In consultation with Vice Provost for Innovation Bill Shaw, those additional resources are aligned with the faculty member’s specific needs and career stage. The aim is to identify the precise needs of faculty members that, when met, will most effectively expand their programming and increase their productivity and impact.
“One of our responsibilities as a leading research university is to bring experts together across disciplines to develop novel approaches to some of the most intractable problems we face as a global society,” says Caroline Genco, provost and senior vice president. “In this work, we are deeply fortunate to have a faculty replete with talent, recruited from around the globe. Our faculty represents, truly, the best of their generation of thinkers and innovators.”
A highly efficient way for Tufts to scale up its drive toward solutions, says Genco, is by investing in some of the university’s exceptional faculty members. “We are pleased to recognize the Provost Catalyst Leaders as outstanding colleagues whose ability to innovate is rivaled only by their fearlessness when it comes to tackling challenging problems,” she says.