Research-Productive Department

Many such books written for department chairs and deans have chosen to address the full range of leadership and management tasks that typically occupy this readership. However, few have narrowed their scope—as this book does—to the important leadership tasks that influence the overall success of academic departments in one critical area: research. This book features the experiences of nearly 40 leaders from well-respected research institutions from across the country. It offers specific, useful recommendations for academic leaders seeking to promote high levels of research productivity, including insight on: recruitment practices, mentoring programs, reward systems, culture-building activities, and the distribution of fiscal as well as human resources.

An eminently practical book, The Research-Productive Department provides readers with two essential tool sets: a user-friendly summary of over 40 years of literature on the characteristics of research-productive organizations, plus a wealth of descriptive examples of how these characteristics are actually manifest in a large number of research-productive academic departments and schools. This book is an engaging exposition of best practices that readers can adapt as befits their own institutional settings.

ANNE MARIE WEBER-MAIN is assistant professor and associate director of research in the department of family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School. With Carole Bland, she helped develop a three-year Clinical Investigator Fellowship for family physicians and codirects a departmental research division that provides consultation, resources, and programs to support faculty-led research. In this capacity she consults with faculty and fellows on their research goals and plays a substantial role in assisting researchers with their scholarly writing projects, that is, the development of grant proposals, journal articles, book chapters, and other research-related manuscripts. She lectures on scholarly writing in a family medicine research courses and cofacilitates a participative writing seminar for family medicine and pediatrics fellows. To these academic roles she brings a diverse blend of educational and professional experiences that span the physical sciences, technical writing, and communications. She received a Ph.D. in chemistry (analytical emphasis) from the University of Minnesota in 1997. her doctoral research was funded by the National Institute of health and has been published in several peer-reviewed journals (Biochemistry, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Archives of Biochemistry). In 1995 she was awarded a mass media Fellowship by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Through this program, which places scientists in media settings to promote the public understanding of science, she researched and wrote science news stories that aired on CNN. She has been active in Graduate Women in Science, serving a three-year term as editor of its national newsletter. In 2002 she completed a core curriculum in medical editing offered by the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) and is continuing her training as a participants in AMWA’s advanced curriculum.

SHARON MARIE LUND resides in St. Paul Minnesota, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in nutritional epidemiology at the University of Minnesota. She received her B.S. in nutrition and dietetics from the University of Minnesota and an M.S. in nutrition and dietetics from New York University in Manhattan. Her expertise is in diet assessment—measuring the impact of diet on health and diseases in large populations. Her professional experience includes directing a Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Program in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and developing policy in maternal and child health at Minnesota’s state health and human service agencies. She has lectured and conducted research in the University of Minnesota’s Division of Epidemiology. She is also collaborating with international foundations and agencies in East Africa to develop a comprehensive public health program, which would include a food supplementation program, designed to serve vulnerable populations in developing and war-torn nations.

DEBORAH A. FINSTAD is director of research services in the Department of Family medicine and Community Health, University of Minnesota. Since 1986 she has consulted with faculty and fellows on their research projects and assisted with instrument design, collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of quantitative and qualitative data. The Projects cover a diverse range of research areas, including cancer prevention, smoking cessation, sexual health, women’s health, and faculty vitality. She lectures on instrument design and database management for the fellow’s seminars.