In his Town Hall address on September 26, 2016, Vice Chancellor for Research Steven R. Goodman, PhD, announced that the Office of Research Development had recently purchased Elsevier’s Pure Funding Discovery Module. Pure will provide UTHSC with a public-facing portal which will allow the university to showcase its faculty and their research expertise, thus increasing UTHSC’s visibility to the global research community, while also identifying and tracking targeted funding opportunities specific to each investigators research interests.
Lisa Youngentob, director of the Office of Research Development, says “Pure will transform not only the method of how UTHSC investigators are receiving funding opportunities, but more importantly, the quality of the funding opportunities.”
Using Elsevier’s Fingerprint EngineTM, Pure will provide all faculty currently doing, or who are interested in doing, re- search the ability to be ‘fingerprinted’. Postdocs and graduate students will also have this ability. This unique Fingerprint is based on a researcher’s publications. The Fingerprint will be used to search Elsevier’s SciVal Funding database of nearly 9,000 extramural funding opportunities, matching the funding agency’s RFAs to the researcher’s personal Fingerprint. Investigators will be notified via email alerts of all matching funding opportunities. Researchers will also have the ability to search the funding database themselves and share funding opportunities with their collaborators.
“The investigator’s Fingerprint will also be linked to a personalized, searchable profile, allowing researchers to be discovered by potential collaborators both at UTHSC and beyond,” said Youngentob. The portal, called “Experts @ UTHSC”, displays aggregated information about researcher outputs- including publications, projects, awards, teaching activity, datasets, press clip- pings, posters, and more – all in one place. Pure creates the basic profile, but also allows users the ability to verify, add, or update their information at any time.
“The Pure portal will help stimulate collaborations among investigators here on campus, by identifying potential partners for funding and projects,” says Youngentob. “It will also allow us to promote our faculty and their research expertise by enabling external academic or industry partners to easily discover an investigator’s work and foster new collaboratives.”
Additionally, the Experts portal offers a visual representation of the relationships between researchers, grants, projects, outputs, journals, external collaborators and more. It also visualizes the relationships between each faculty member and their collaborators on awards and publications.
The acquisition of Pure is part of the Operational Strategic Plan for Research’s roadmap to help achieve the Chancellor’s goal of doubling research at UTHSC over the next 10 years.
The photo below is a snapshot of Indiana University School of Medicine’s “IUSM ReSEARCH Connect,” a similar representation of what the “Experts @ UTHSC” portal will look like.