Name: Alice Espinosa Miehl
Position: Director, Office of Research Development
Office: Division of Research
Institution: Florida Atlantic University (FAU)
What attracted you to this work?
My background is in English and finance, and I actually started at FAU not in RD but rather in a financial capacity. Grants were a logical combination of my experience in writing and budgets.
My passion is clearly in RD. When you’re reading a grant proposal, you get to engage with the faculty, ask them questions and read about their interesting work. I never get tired of it, and I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to something greater, something that benefits “the greater good.”
What’s your favorite thing about your work?
I enjoy participating in the “arc” of the work. First, keeping an eye out for the perfect funding opportunity. I carve out time each day to look at new funding opportunities. Next, making a match and connecting a faculty member who has been looking for funding with that perfect opportunity. Finally, supporting them to submit a proposal for that perfect match and finding out they got funded. Helping them full circle!
What’s a handy tool in your tool kit?
We disseminate a monthly funding opportunities newsletter populated with opportunities from the GrantForward funding search database. We build this newsletter by “flagging” opportunities in GrantForward with tags based on theme and the month we plan to disseminate them. In this way we curate what opportunities are best fit for FAU faculty, send them out through the monthly newsletter, while also building a month-specific list of opportunities that we can return to each year to promote again, saving us time in the future.
What’s your wish for improving your work?
As a growing research university, we are always working to understand what we are competitive for in terms of funding opportunities and what we need to continue to grow. As we advance in national rankings, we may become ineligible for some opportunities, so which we should be seeking out and applying for will continue to be a moving target.
How could our organization take steps to improve?
FL-RDA is a very approachable organization that’s not overly structured. If I have a question, I feel like I can ask it. If I had one idea for improvement, it may be to provide an opportunity for more people to contribute. We have many members who attend monthly meetings but may hang back from fully engaging due to a lack of time available to invest.
One thing we could do at monthly meetings is to provide an opportunity at the end for attendees to share something they came across over the past month that was new or helpful for them. In that way, people could contribute in just a few seconds without having to prepare much ahead of time. I am especially interested in different ways people are using technology, including AI.
What role could you see playing someday in the Florida Alliance?
Perhaps the Interdisciplinary Collaboration Committee (ICC) because I can see how it could directly help FAU and integrate well with what I want to grow here, namely, connecting our faculty with those at other institutions around the state.