Provost’s Catalyst Program Launches

The Provost's Catalyst Program is a new university-wide effort designed to provide additional resources to faculty across Tufts as they generate novel scholarship and pathbreaking research. As part of the university's commitment to support the success of its faculty, the program was launched last academic year as a pilot initiative with a targeted group. Ultimately, the program aims to offer support across three categories of faculty: early career, mid-career, and established.

Specifically, the program supports extraordinary faculty with a demonstrated record of developing transformative solutions to national and global challenges, sustaining a research program with an emphasis on interdisciplinary and translational research, teaching both undergraduate and graduate students, and being highly active and recognized nationally and internationally in their discipline.

Referred to as Provost Catalyst Leaders by this initiative, these faculty members receive a combination of funding and other support from the Provost's Office, for a defined period of time. In consultation with Vice Provost for Innovation Bill Shaw, those additional resources are aligned with the faculty member's specific needs and career stage. The aim is to identify the precise needs of faculty members that, when met, will most effectively expand their programming and increase their productivity and impact.

"One of our responsibilities as a leading research university is to bring experts together across disciplines to develop novel approaches to some of the most intractable problems we face as a global society," says Caroline Genco, provost and senior vice president. "In this work, we are deeply fortunate to have a faculty replete with talent, recruited from around the globe. Our faculty represents, truly, the best of their generation of thinkers and innovators."

A highly efficient way for Tufts to scale up its drive toward solutions, says Genco, is by investing in some of the university's exceptional faculty members. "We are pleased to recognize the Provost Catalyst Leaders as outstanding colleagues whose ability to innovate is rivaled only by their fearlessness when it comes to tackling challenging problems," she says.

Caroline Genco, Provost and Senior Vice President

In designing the Catalyst Program, the Provost's Office has been focused on further strengthening the university's competitiveness for large, multi-disciplinary funding opportunities. Another objective: to develop still further the network of experts across Tufts' schools who can serve as prospective collaborators with one another-and to expand the university's network of prospective stakeholders and partners across government, industry, and other higher education institutions.

The pilot was designed, in large part, to align with Tufts areas of research excellence, such as cellular agriculture, sustainable materials, the future of food, health equity, and African American public history. Correspondingly, participants in the pilot-the first cohort of Catalyst Leaders-include:

• Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, Okoro Professor of Black Maternal Health and director of the Center for Black Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice at the School of Medicine
• Kendra Field, associate professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts
• Kerri Greenidge, Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora
• David Kaplan, Stern Family Endowed Professor of Engineering
• Dariush Mozaffarian, Distinguished Professor and director of the Food Is Medicine Institute
• Fiorenzo Omenetto, Doble Professor of Engineering and director of Silklab

To date, the Provost Catalyst Leaders program has provided a variety of different resources to the participants in the pilot, including grant-writing services, event-related support, and strategic guidance on corporate engagement and business development.

"The support of the Catalyst Program has given us the freedom to envision the kind of infrastructure we believe our public-facing work deserves-something that, until recently, we barely allowed ourselves to imagine," Greenidge says. "We have experienced the support of the Catalyst Program as an investment in our capacity to build things in and for the world that will ultimately redound to the university," adds Field.

The Provost's Office plans to begin accepting applications for the next cohort of Provost Catalyst Leaders in spring 2025.

As a next component of the Catalyst Program, work has begun on the Provost Catalyst Fellows, which will provide hands-on administrative opportunities to faculty members that have expressed an interest in leadership roles within academic administration. (As part of a separate but related effort, the Provost's Office is also devising a series of leadership development offerings focused on the business of academic institutions.) More information about the Provost Catalyst Fellows program is expected to be available in the spring.

"At Tufts, we are fortunate to have so many faculty members for whom our investment in them can maximize both their professional growth and their impact on the innovation ecosystem at Tufts and beyond," says Genco. "It is a privilege, through these talented colleagues, to catalyze the creation of knowledge, solutions, and systems that will drive change and improve the world for everyone."

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