The Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) Taskforce is charged with making recommendations to elevate the scope and visibility of scholarship across the University’s humanities, social sciences, and arts units.
The taskforce functions as a strategy incubator and team builder, assisting the Office for Research & Economic Development in devising and implementing sustainable, cross-departmental research collaborations capable of launching, maintaining and recognizing high-impact, interdisciplinary projects that tackle complex societal challenges.
The taskforce’s primary goal is to make a series of recommendations to ORED to achieve two primary ends:
- To develop ways to identify faculty and staff across disciplines with complementary expertise and research interests and to offer methods that establish the supportive, collaborative structures necessary to launch and maintain their research efforts.
- To propose ways to ensure the systematic identification, mentoring and nomination of outstanding faculty and staff to successfully compete for the prestigious external awards that their work warrants, thereby celebrating scholarly accomplishments and impact while also maximizing institutional recognition.
The long-term vision for these recommendations is to work toward establishing a comprehensive STEAM Research Enterprise at UA, one that deliberately integrates and elevates scholarship across STEM and Non-STEM disciplines. This unified structure will help to position UA as a national leader in addressing complex societal challenges through truly holistic, interdisciplinary research.