John Carfora, Ed.D., joined the LMU Research and Sponsored Projects team as Executive Director in September. He has previously directed the Sponsored Projects Offices at Amherst College, Boston College, and Dartmouth College, and is considered a leading authority on international research collaborations. He has received numerous awards, including the Distinguished Service Award from the National Council for Research Administrators (NCURA) in 2007.
Q: Welcome to LMU. We are thrilled to have you. Moving from the East Coast, where you have lived for most of your life, to the West Coast must have been quite a change.
A: I am delighted to be at LMU and in Los Angeles. Having a daughter in Santa Monica (she’s a social worker) and a sister in San Diego, I don’t feel too far from my familial roots in Connecticut. My wife (who is also my high school sweetheart…though I regularly remind her how “lucky” she is to have me) and I lived abroad for several years (our daughter was actually born in same hospital as Mick Jagger), and feel the change of environs to be more spiritual and personal, and far less just geographic in nature. We love the LMU culture and community, and my immediate colleagues – Joe Hellige, Joseph McNicholas, Yolanda Uzzell, Cynthia Carr and Marci Stephens-Steinbacher – are terrific.
Q. You have accomplished so much across your career. Do you have specific plans for your time at LMU?
A. First, I am delighted to be heading the launch of LMU’s new Office for Research and Sponsored Projects (ORSP), which besides its new name and website, offers more in-depth services and support for the LMU research community. Second, I have met a range of outstanding people at LMU – students, staff and faculty – and I am anxious to strengthen, grow and support the university’s culture of learning, research, scholarship and creative activity. I am also hoping to do some research of my own, as well as author several publications.
Q. Can you tell us more about the name change? Why ORSP?
A. Simply stated, our work at ORSP is all about supporting research, scholarship, and creative and artistic activity – broadly referred to in higher education as research – and helping respective faculty and administrators manage various aspects of an extramurally funded sponsored project.
Q. What other projects are you working on?
A. I guess you can say I help support the research and scholarly interests of LMU in a number of external ways. For example, I serve as co-chair of a working group – on international research collaborations – at the National Academies in Washington, D.C., serve on the Board of Directors of the Immersive Education initiative, serve on the Editorial Board of the Research Management Review, chair the Commission on International Research Administration, and have published the most quoted chapter on international collaborations currently in-print. Every year, I am invited to lecture abroad on international research collaborations, and during the summer of 2009 I am off to Ireland and Denmark.
Q. Didn’t you begin in academia as faculty? How did you move into research administration?
A. I began my career in research administration, believe it or not, in 1974 when I was a graduate student; indeed, a very skilled Director of Grants and Contracts asked me if I wanted a job! Since that time, I have been working in the field in both the USA and Europe, and even when I was a tenured faculty member during the 1980s I was still directly involved in research administration. During the 1990s, however, I decided to make a full-time transition to research administration and devote part-time to university-level teaching. Starting in 1990 I increasingly became associated multi-national aspects of higher education, which further set me on a path in international research collaborations.
I don’t think I ever fully moved away from an active academic career. Instead, I found a comfortable balance between research administration, university-level teaching (albeit part-time), and my own active research agenda. I am most fortunate to have found a comfortable way to meaningfully balance the three. The attraction of research administration, for me anyhow, involves the shaping of practical solutions to administrative challenges. The joy of teaching keeps me close to younger generations of learners. Research allows me to empirically investigate phenomena of interest, and writing gives voice to my thinking and research.
Q. So you still pursue research along with your successful career as an administrator?
A. Absolutely. I am updating a chapter to a book that will soon be published in its second edition, and I co-authored a book – currently with the publisher – on idea development and project management. I am also writing a manuscript on, broadly speaking, the extent to which campus-based and larger non-institutional factors influence decision-making in higher education. I am working a second (brief) article for the Harvard Magazine , and have started a book on international research collaborations.