Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental SciencesCooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder
CIRES Strategic Plan
A roadmap for 2022-2027
CIRES Strategic Plan
A roadmap for 2022-2027
Navigating wild terrain, scientists carry gear to install land-based instruments on a small rock island in northwestern Greenland in August 2018.
- Twila Moon/CIRES
In 2021, several CIRES Fellows and other staff embarked on an effort to revise the institute's strategic plan. Our strategic imperatives are described below.
- Strengthen and opportunistically enhance existing research, outreach, and engagement to keep CIRES at the forefront of scientific excellence and impact.
- Support the continued excellence and development of research, data, outreach, and engagement programs.
- Be responsive to and support researchers and research groups who identify and want to capitalize on opportunities for innovative new research directions.
- Create mechanisms that encourage graduate students to catalyze research collaborations across CIRES groups in both CU and NOAA.
- Collectively identify, prioritize, and implement new initiatives, opportunities, and research directions.
Identify new initiatives through diverse mechanisms that solicit input from all of CIRES. - Prioritize new initiatives through regular retreats to assess trends and resources as an institute.
- Define a protocol for identifying pivot points given trends in metrics.
- Establish transparent decision-making and implementation processes.
- Get to know one another.
- Host and encourage participation in campus and NOAA seminar series.
- Provide NOAA and CU Boulder lab tours for research teams / students / postdocs.
- Create mechanisms to make it easier for CIRES@NOAA and NOAA scientists to guest lecture and help with classes on campus.
- Link people who work on similar themes.
- Organize expert-to-expert meetings on specific topics with contributions from across CIRES.
- Arrange panel discussions on different themes with experts from across CIRES (with themes proposed by CIRES members).
- Establish new cross-disciplinary relationships focused on exploratory themes.
- Hold retreats to bring people together, crossing disciplinary themes.
- Fund IRP, GSRA, VFP for cross-CIRES research activities.
- Designate a person to facilitate and coordinate cross-disciplinary activities.
- Foster innovation through collaboration.
- Define innovation for different job types (staff, researchers, students, faculty) and areas of improvement (leadership, diversity, inclusivity, outreach).
- Develop programs and activities that encourage people to communicate who don’t typically interact with each other (students, fellows, early-career researchers, staff, centers, etc.)
- Identify meeting space outside of secure areas.
- Provide opportunities for shared supervision of scientific staff and students.
- Provide full support to the CIRES DEI Strategic Plan and gather data that informs ongoing initiatives.
- Assess employee satisfaction on a regular basis and encourage participation in campus culture surveys.
- Track personnel complaints and employee relations issues.
- Evaluate retention efforts and programs for existing employees, including monitoring turnover rates, incentivizing completion of exit interview surveys, and performing stay interviews.
- Increase engagement levels through CIRES-wide events such as town halls and cross-disciplinary workshops.
- Build leadership and management training that creates opportunities for professional growth and monitor participation and outcomes.
- Implement CU HR training as appropriate.
- Develop and implement new, evidence-based, CIRES-specific trainings.
- Promote trainings and related CIRES professional development funding.
- Collect feedback via the ASA process to inform professional development programming.
- Extend existing mentoring programs and implement a graduate student mentoring program.
- Institute discussions with graduate students to determine the nature and organization of an effective mentoring program for that group.
- Implement a graduate student mentoring program.
- Identify other groups in CIRES that would benefit and are not covered under current programs.
- Advocate for policies and programs that remove barriers and increase the support for our researchers, staff and students.
- Collaborate widely on outreach and communications efforts within and beyond CU Boulder and NOAA to promote scientific literacy and CIRES science.
- Support “broader impacts” work in new science proposals and connect researchers to existing opportunities to have broader impact.
- Regularly connect policy makers, journalists, and the public who have questions with scientists who may have answers.
- Enhance strategic communication on specific, focused topics through hiring, making connections, and expanding graphics and data visualization capabilities.
- Collaborate with other departments and student groups to make science-based content more accessible to broader audiences.
- Expand participation and skill in outreach and communications:
- Work toward a culture that values authentic research-related communications and outreach, including in performance evaluations.
- Build more skillful science communicators by supporting, enabling, and training scientists and students who want to do outreach or communications to develop their skills.