focus on the FUTURE

The purpose of the council is to advise the Provost’s Office on all matters pertaining to research including promotion and growth; improving competitiveness for external funding; website and information distribution practices; and proposals regarding research related support, policies and procedures.

The research council will create subcommittees to address research misconduct; research symposiums; Institutional Review Board policies; responsible conduct of research training and practices; and establishing centers of research excellence (COREs), among other topics.

As an education leader in Nashville, a city recognized as a capital in the health care industry, the university launched the Lipscomb University Health Sciences Center (LUHSC), in February to serve as a hub that encompasses academic programs, research initiatives, and community engagements and partnerships.

Created out of a reorganization of the existing College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences into two stand-alone entities, the existing College of Pharmacy and a newly formed College of Health Sciences, LUHSC will allow for more focused programming and resources.

“Elevating health sciences education to an academic center is a common model among the top universities in the nation to further health sciences education, research and practice,” said Lipscomb President Dr. Candice McQueen.

The LUHSC is poised to facilitate the creation of new programs and Lipscomb COREs, academic and intellectual communities of researchers with similar interests, as it provides an umbrella structure for researchers across campus to collaborate with the health science faculty. The University Research Council worked to develop a plan to establish COREs in the future during the spring semester, said Hebert.

Among the center’s areas of focus will be growing Lipscomb’s biomedical research portfolio; creating a national model for interprofessional education and collaborative care; developing impactful partnerships with industry and the health care sector to provide practice site opportunities and workforce partnerships; and growing and expanding crossdisciplinary health sciences programs across Lipscomb’s academic enterprise.

In the coming years Lipscomb University will continue to promote meritorious research and scholarly productivity by developing new doctorate programs, most immediately through the new Doctorate of Philosophy in Leadership and Policy Studies announced in February.

This interdisciplinary program will prepare students for high-level careers in leadership and service across a range of sectors with an emphasis on preparing leaders in education, as of this fall, and in public service and health care, as of fall 2024.

While housed in Lipscomb’s nationally recognized College of Education, it is offered in collaboration with Lipscomb’s College of Business, College of Health Sciences and College of Leadership & Public Service.

This three-year program includes a research component and dissertation in addition to its core curriculum and options for guided electives in education leadership and policy, public service leadership and policy, and health care leadership and policy. It will help students develop many of the personal core competencies valued in today’s businesses and organizations, such as strategic planning, organizational skills, project management, problem solving, team leadership and adaptability.

“The goal is to equip professionals who can pursue challenging high-level tasks requiring advanced knowledge, training and rigor, and to do so with the highest levels of integrity, ethical understanding and behavior,” said Hebert. “Another critical component is that students will be able to focus on a research topic about which they are passionate, that is in-depth, dissertation-level research.”

The Ph.D. in Leadership and Policy Studies is the fifth doctoral-level program and the second Ph.D. program offered by Lipscomb.

Also, in the past year, the university began to leverage the power of the Beaman Library by establishing the Carolyn Wilson Digital Collections (digitalcollections.lipscomb. edu), a digital repository capable of housing the scholarly work product of all Lipscomb researchers.

This database, powered by the Digital Commons platform, is intended to serve as a centralized digital space to publish all of Lipscomb’s research outcomes, said Jan Cohu, systems librarian and member of the University Research Council.

So far, the platform provides access to doctoral students’ dissertations; abstracts of student research presented at the Student

Scholars Symposium; faculty scholarly publications; selected items from the Robert E. Hooper Archives; digitized images of The Backlog, Lipscomb’s yearbook, dating back to 1910; and the open access publication, the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy

Future plans include posting digitized images of The Babbler, Lipscomb’s student newspaper of years’ past; students’ master’s theses; and faculty poster presentations, conference papers and data sets, said Cohu. The platform can even host original music compositions or public performances of public domain works, she said.

Having such a digital repository makes a big impact on scholars’ ability to find Lipscomb’s research through Internet search engines such as Google and is an important step in garnering recognition from the scholarly community, said Cohu.

In addition, a centralized clearinghouse promotes collaboration among Lipscomb’s own researchers in complementary fields. Searchers within Lipscomb can have access to their fellow researchers’ work that would otherwise be hidden behind paywalls. Published research for a whole department can be downloaded for grant proposals and accreditation reviews, said Cohu.