Leveraged Research Excellence

Faculty Hiring for Leveraged Research Excellence (FHLRE) is a faculty hiring program aimed at further elevating UCI’s research excellence by strategically leveraging current and past investments.

In the last several years, the campus has invested in substantial resources – advanced and unique equipment, facilities, space, and people – in research centers, institutes, and equivalent organizations. The goal of this program is to catalyze and enable the addition of new faculty whose expertise, background, and research directions are synergistic UCI’s centers and institutes.

All new faculty members hired with the help of this program will have their academic appointments in academic departments. This will serve to expand and strengthen ties between centers/institutes and schools/departments and create new opportunities for our current faculty to engage in innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship.

All recruitments will be conducted in the context of inclusive excellence.

Outcomes & Updates

Program Outcomes 2016-17 (PDF) (UCInetID required)

March 22, 2017: Seven proposals have been selected for full or partial funding. For more details, view the following message.

Oct. 19, 2017: Notification of Intent and Proposal Deadlines, view original message.

Application Process

Notification of Intent to Submit
A notification of intent to submit is required prior to submitting a proposal to this program. Directors of centers, institutes or equivalent organizations are asked to send an email to OR@research.uci.edu by December 8, 2017 indicating their interest in submitting a proposal. This notification should include:

• • Name of proposer
  • Name of Center/Institute
  • Brief description of the research expertise/disicipline of the new hire(s)

Proposal

Proposals should be submitted to the Office of Research via the UCI Review Application Portal by Friday, January 12, 2018.
Aggressive and visionary proposals are invited from directors of centers or institutes or equivalent organizations involving collaboration with one or more schools, departments, and relevant interested faculty from all schools and units at UCI. The most competitive proposals will address the following criteria:

• • Alignment with the campus strategic plan and the significance of the intellectual opportunity for research and creative contributions
  • Enhancement of collaborative, multidisciplinary research and scholarship.
  • Contribution to inclusive excellence
  • Leveraging of resources from existing centers/institutes/ORUs or equivalent organizations and school/departments
  • Plan of coordination, and where appropriate matching FTEs, between Schools/Departments and Centers/Institutes/ORUs

Typical proposals will be for 2-5 new faculty hires, including any matching FTEs. Proposals should contain the following sections and not exceed 5 pages:

• • Description of the proposed new faculty: proposer and research center/institute, areas of research expertise, home school/department, level of appointment. Please note that it is not necessary (although acceptable) to identify or specify names of potential recruits
  • Leveraging rationale: how does the proposed hiring plan leverage past and current investments; reduction in setup requirements (dollars, space) as a result of leveraging
  • Opportunity for increasing research enterprise, extramural funding (programs and sources), and graduate students
  • Recruitment plan addressing inclusive excellence
  • Coordination (and matching FTEs if appropriate) with departments and schools. In case of matching FTEs, please include letter(s) from the Dean(s) as supplemental documents

Review Process

All proposals will be reviewed in three steps:

Step 1: The Vice Chancellor for Research, in consultation with the Academic Senate Chair, will appoint a committee (possibly more than one) of faculty members for evaluation of the proposals addressing the review criteria specified above.

Step 2: A committee of deans and vice provosts will take the results from step 1 and provide a rank order of proposals.

Step 3: The Provost & EVC and Vice Chancellor for Research will make final decisions.