Theme1_Strat_Plan_2021

THEME ONE

Research Prominence

Queen’s Engineering: Driving Curiosity Forward

Research Prominence Queen’s Engineering is committed to fostering an inclusive environment that supports research excellence and collaboration. We will build on our growing strengths and create an environment that brings together faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, industry, government, and the wider community to produce research that is impactful both in academic journals and where we work and live.

There are many exciting projects and areas of strength, and we have been hiring top researchers to expand our research profile. Queen’s Engineering has recently established clusters, for example the Ingenuity Labs and the Beaty Water Research Centre, that can produce interdisciplinary world-changing research and we are building on this momentum. The Faculty is large, but the research agenda we set out means that we need to grow further, with more faculty and graduate students to support world-class research.

The Faculty will release a detailed companion Strategic Research Plan to complement this Strategic Plan. It will include a new framework to foster the creation of additional research clusters and to provide tailored support to advance existing clusters to the next level of research prominence.

It will aim to foster a culture in which the outstanding research that is being conducted at the Faculty is valued, recognized and visible. It also aims to create a research environment that provides the tools, training and support necessary for our students and faculty to reach their full potential and achieve the highest levels of research excellence together.

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OBJECTIVE 1.

Support research excellence SA 1.1

Ensure early-career faculty members receive comprehensive training, mentoring and networking opportunities within and beyond established centers, institutions, or faculty partnerships.

SA 1.2

Focus on faculty renewal and growth to increase our research capacity (ensuring our faculty/student ratio is below our peer engineering programs).

SA 1.3

Develop new funding mechanisms to support cross-disciplinary interactions and collaborations within and outside Queen’s Engineering, including those to support international collaboration and mobility of scholars.

SA 1.4

Identify and support a number of research excellence clusters, organized around established and/or emerging strength areas, ensuring that these clusters are connected to at least one Sustainability Development Goal (SDG) and that they draw on interdisciplinary expertise. SDGs are 17 global development goals as first put forward by the UN in 2015.

SA 1.5

Enhance administrative support systems to facilitate the development and management of large-scale external grants and contracts.

SA 1.6

Create a new staff position to identify, facilitate, and support the development research areas that bridge the Faculty and industrial partners, with a particular focus on developing partnerships focused on SDGs.

Queen’s Engineering: Driving Curiosity Forward

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OBJECTIVE 2.

OBJECTIVE 3.

Build research capacity through graduate education and support

Make research excellence visible in Canada and beyond

SA 2.1

Ensure graduate students have appropriate support and training in academic writing and proposal writing.

SA 3.1

SA 2.2

Introduce new social programs and groups and foster existing ones to build a sense of community among all graduate students.

Leverage marketing campaigns to better communicate and showcase Queen’s Engineering research and its impact on the world to broader communities.

SA 3.2

Focus on providing internal and external communication about engineering research to undergraduate students that facilitates understanding about what the different graduate options are, how graduate research can lead to solving major challenges, and what career advantages a graduate degree can offer.

SA 3.3

Develop a new marketing campaign targeting excellent graduate students across Canada, communicating broadly about any new doctoral and post-doctoral scholarships at Queen’s Engineering.

SA 3.4

Commit to being in the top 10 Canadian Engineering schools for the scientific impact of research publications.

SA 3.5

Increase the overall percentage of faculty members’ publications that have an external or international co-author.

SA 2.3

Compete for graduate students by committing to being in the top five nationally for financial support of both international and domestic doctoral students.

SA 2.4

Strive to have faculty members mentor new undergraduate students with a range of research experiences (e.g. provide more summer research opportunities, research internships).

SA 2.5

Provide support for faculty to advertise their research projects and those of the Faculty’s centres and institutes to attract graduate students with expertise in such research.