Research Foundation For State University of New York

As the largest comprehensive university-connected research foundation in the country, The Research Foundation for The State University of New York (RF) serves The State University of New York (SUNY) by providing essential administrative services that enable SUNY faculty to focus their efforts on the education of students and the performance of life-changing research across a wide range of disciplines including medicine, engineering, physical sciences, energy, computer science, and social sciences.

We work with the academic and business leadership of SUNY campuses to support research and discovery through the administration of sponsored projects and technology transfer and management of intellectual property for public benefit and economic growth.

Our mission is to provide talent, services, and technology that empower SUNY to research, innovate, and transfer discoveries that transform the world’s knowledge economy.

Our vision is to make SUNY the best place for faculty, students and staff to research, innovate, and solve the world’s most pressing problems.

In January 2019, the RF’s Board of Directors approved a new 5-year Strategic Plan that will guide the RF’s work going forward and track against its mission. The RF’s Strategic Plan for FY2019-23 is driven by four strategies to achieve three goals:

Four Strategies -
• Empower: Empower individuals with knowledge, authority, and tools to solve problems at the point of service.
• Build: Build on organizational strengths: flexibility, scale, internal controls, core functions, customer service focus, and dedicated, competent people across the enterprise with deep institutional knowledge.
• Improve: Remove administrative layers and barriers to principal investigator success through a discipline of measurable continuous improvement.
• Partner: Tailor research administration processes to accommodate new and different types of partnerships, especially with industry and private foundations.

Three Goals -
• Provide Superior Service: We will meet principal investigator needs and exceed sponsor expectations by empowering our people, recognizing and rewarding service, and acting on input.
• Maximize Effectiveness: We will do the right work that adds value to our campuses and principal investigators, measuring RF outcomes and impact.
• Increase Cost Efficiency: We will streamline processes and cut costs, ensuring that the RF enterprise is as lean as it can be, without compromising quality
The RF’s 2019-2023 Strategic Plan advances SUNY’s goals of doubling research and promoting innovation and economic development, through a cost-efficient operational infrastructure and reducing administrative burden to faculty and graduate students performing research.

The RF and SUNY have a common vision for growing research, reducing administrative burden, improving cost efficiency and effectiveness, and making SUNY a 21st century research-focused university system.

See: http://www.rfsuny.org/about-us/rf-strategic-plan/

The RF provides a central infrastructure of people, technology and processes that enable faculty to: write and submit grant proposals to agencies, foundations and companies; establish contracts and manage funding that is awarded to run campus-based research projects; protect and commercialize intellectual property created within those projects; and promote transparency and accountability throughout the process.
The RF comprises a central office and operating units at 30 state-operated campuses across New York State, and is governed by a board of directors. The RF Board of Directors oversees the operations of the corporation in accordance with its stated mission and purpose. RF Operations Managers at the 30 state-operated campuses are appointed by the RF president on the recommendation of the respective campus president. The RF president delegates to each Operations Manager the authority to execute the powers and duties necessary to conduct RF business at his or her campus in a manner consistent with the RF’s policies and overall system of controls.
We partner with businesses and state and federal agencies to foster research breakthroughs and economic growth, working to combat disease, accelerate technological advancement and mitigate climate change. Examples include Applied Materials, IBM, New York State’s Empire State Development (ESD); New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), Empire State Development Division of Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR), Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), United States Department of Defense, and United States Department of Energy.

Efforts accomplished or planned include:
• The development of operations profiles and risk analyses that will capture and assess for the first time the total cost of research administration at SUNY’s 30 state-operated campuses and provide RF Operations Managers with the data needed to run effective and cost-efficient research operations. Profiles have either been completed or are in progress for the RF’s Central Office and three campuses, and the remainder will be pursued over the next 12 months.
• A customer satisfaction tool to initially measure service on a 5-scale rating to be followed by a more detailed survey assessment for faculty to rate service. Data will be used to regularly assess, plan around, and communicate the level of service the RF is providing to its customers.
• An assessment of our IT operation to best meet our strategic goals to support SUNY research and innovation which resulted in the selection of a new vendor to provide commodity services such as Helpdesk, Desktop Support, Networks, and Windows Services, with other services, such as Application Development and Data Center Services to be provided by an in-house IT staff.
• Training of RF staff on reporting and data analysis and the basic operations of sponsored programs administration.
• The 2019 Research Administrators’ Symposium (the third such symposium in the past six years) that convened over three 300 participants across the SUNY research community for presentations and workshops on the full life cycle of research administration covering project and proposal development; grants management; compliance; commercialization; and entrepreneurship.
• External partnership and corporate engagement boot camps to deliver to academic leadership and practitioners proven models of how to engage and drive mutually beneficial outcomes around research, technology transfer, workforce development, recruiting, and philanthropic support.
• Sharing of best practices and the promotion of benchmarking through Communities of Practice (CoP) that target and tackle critical business issues. We have initiated CoP’s that span all key stakeholder groups in areas covering sponsored programs management, operations management, technology transfer, and human resources.


• Launch of a project to help campuses attract and retain top postdoctoral talent with the development of a new fringe benefit rate for post-doctoral employees for implementation in September 2019.
• Development of new methods of cost structure and communication for nonfederal sponsors
• Implementation of automated solutions to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and promote paperless transactions.
• Make strategic investments at targeted stages of the sponsored program and innovation lifecycle, including SUNY’s Pre-Award and Compliance System (PACS), the SUNY Technology Accelerator Fund (TAF), and Express Licensing.