The Stewarding Excellence @ Illinois initiative has come to a close, with final reports issued Aug. 14 for the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the Institute for Genomic Biology and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Stewarding Excellence began in 2010, with campus-led project teams reviewing 19 separate topics affecting campus, from academic units to general university practices.
Recommendations included money-saving and mission-enhancing ideas, most of which already have been implemented.
“These documents bring to a close the formal work of Stewarding Excellence @ Illinois,” said Richard P. Wheeler, who served as interim vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost while the initiative was ongoing.
“I would like to thank the many faculty, staff and students who have stepped up to engage in these reviews in one capacity or another over the past 2 1/2 years,” he said. “The deep strengths of this remarkable university and its people have never been more apparent to me.”
The final report for Beckman and IGB concluded that better communication could alleviate many issues related to space allocation, public relations, alumni solicitations, faculty reviews, research themes and program formulation.
“One of the primary challenges noted by many is the fact that both must work with so many different units,” the project team noted in its report.
Wheeler’s review recommended remaining issues be worked out with the leadership of the Office of the Provost and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, both of which have new leaders this year.
The NCSA report was a study of how the center operates and recommendations include getting the most value from current campus funding; improving oversight and management of the Blue Waters project; restructuring the NCSA’s Institute for Advance Computing Applications and Technologies; and removing NCSA operation from campus consolidated computing clusters.
In addition, the Blue Waters Campus Initiative, which starts this fall, is designed to recruit up to 10 new faculty members to build multidisciplinary teams for achieving high-performance computing breakthroughs.
“Through that process and the careful and responsive strategic planning carried out by NCSA leadership the campus is poised to continue its unparalleled success in high-performance computing,” Wheeler said.
More detailed information on Stewarding Excellence @ Illinois reports and recommendations is online.
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