Sara Reardon, nature
Helping with grant applications, ensuring compliance and coordinating with funders is all part of the job.
Research administrators provide essential support in organizing grants and collaborations.
The 2011 earthquake in Japan changed neuroscientist Tadashi Sugihara’s career path forever. Sugihara had been working as a senior research scientist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako, but the damage to his laboratory and other setbacks from the quake prompted him to reconsider his dream of becoming a principal investigator.
His lab had been partnering with Japanese automotive manufacturer Toyota to integrate brain science into car-safety systems, and Sugihara had learnt that he was good at the intensive budgeting and report writing that such a collaboration entailed. “I realized some of the researchers really did not like these kinds of negotiations with a big company,” he says. “I was gradually understanding another side of my skills that made me very useful.”
So when the Japanese Ministry of Education launched an initiative in 2011 to fund the appointments of academic administrators, Sugihara applied for a job as research administrator at Kyoto University. Although he was initially worried about abandoning his dream, he was able to move past those concerns. “I didn’t feel bad at all,” he says. “The transition was very smooth.”
Now a research-grant-application manager, Sugihara helps scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology to apply for funds and manages the budgets of existing awards. Relationships between research and administrative operations can be thorny, but he is pleased with his role. “This kind of job makes us very happy because we feel we are welcome,” he says. When researchers receive a grant, they are pleased to be able to call on him and his colleagues for help with editing papers and other support.
Long seen as a supporting role, research administration has increasingly come to be recognized in academia as a profession in its own right. At least three institutions in the United States offer master’s degrees in the field, and numerous professional societies worldwide help administrators with career development and networking. The Research Administrators Certification Council, a non-profit organization in Westminster, Colorado, offers education and testing for a professional certificate that is required for many US government jobs in the field, and the Awards for Training and Higher Education organization performs a similar service in the United Kingdom. The United States has a National Research Administrator Day (25 September) to recognize those in the field.