UT Social Work Researcher Hub is a centralized platform powered by Notion, aiming to streamline access to research resources and enhance communication for faculty and research staff.
Research-related content, such as funding calls, templates, and deadlines, is often buried across email threads, shared drives, or outdated webpages. Faculty and research staff waste valuable time searching, re-confirming, or duplicating efforts just to locate the information they need.
Navigating pre-award and post-award processes can be especially challenging for new faculty members. The lack of a clear, centralized entry point makes onboarding slow and stressful.
Joining the team, I began by shadowing and supporting day-to-day administrative workflows. This hands-on involvement allowed me to surface the often undocumented standard procedures behind pre-award and post-award processes. I then translated this operational knowledge into a formal Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), which laid the foundation for the Faculty Manual, a guidebook that clarified key tasks, timelines, responsible roles, and available resources across the research support journey.
To ensure internal coordination was efficient and tailored, I compiled a centralized list of 44 active faculty members, noting each person’s research interests, and assigned Account Manager. This dataset made it easier to match funding opportunities, streamline internal routing, and personalize support in future iterations of the Researcher Hub.
To organize institutional knowledge for daily Use and reduce inefficiencies caused by scattered information, I consolidated key datasets into standardized, filterable formats:
- Funding Opportunities: 68 items, categorized by source and relevance to faculty interest.
- Award & Proposal List: 170+ entries across systems, integrated into a unified table for real-time updates.
To further support faculty-level access and self-management, we created Personal Folders for each researcher, containing commonly reused documents like biosketches, research facilities statements.
This groundwork also informed the information architecture of the Hub, guiding how databases were structured and linked for daily use.
After comparing multiple platforms, we selected Notion for its unique balance of flexibility and structure:
- Modular Layout: Easily customizable templates and intuitive interface.
- Cross-linking: Enables dynamic connections between researchers, proposals, deadlines, and contacts.
- Automation: Support trigger automatic email notifications based on database updates
- Access Control: View/edit permissions support role-specific access to sensitive data.
Keep track of critical project dates, including proposal submissions, progress report deadlines, and compliance checkpoints, all in one integrated calendar view.
This section brings together essential resources, including the Faculty Manual, Personal Folder (e.g., biosketches, research facility documents), annual Account Reports, institutional wikis, and the university-wide grant submission platform, streamlining research workflows by reducing system fragmentation.
View and manage all active proposals and funded awards. Each entry links to relevant submission portals for faster follow-up and updates.
Discover internal, federal, and public foundation funding opportunities, filtered and recommended based on stated research areas and preferences.
To ensure that the Researcher Hub aligns with both user needs and institutional workflows, iterative feedback sessions were conducted with three research faculty members and multiple OADR staff (pre- and post-award specialists) through semi-structured Zoom meetings. Their insights informed key iterations, including adjustments to navigation clarity, calendar labeling, and the placement of commonly accessed resources.
- Enhance Personal Folder structure with subfolders by award, for better budget and task management
- Integrate a searchable FAQ to improve content usability
This project was a meaningful extension of my prior professional experience into a new institutional and cultural context.
Executing a design project within an academic institution required navigating multiple layers of complexity:
- Ensuring data security and compliance meant that every decision, especially those involving access, storage, and visibility.
- Bridging communication between faculty and administrative staff demanded clarity, structure, and sensitivity to differing roles and institutional priorities.
- Internally, it was equally important to align the team around feasible workflows, so that the final solution could not only address user needs, but also be realistically implemented and maintained within existing systems.
I drew on my past experience managing timelines, identifying procedural risks, and aligning competing priorities, adapting these abilities to support decision-making during the whole process. This experience reinforced the value of transferable skills in new systems, and deepened my confidence in facilitating complex, stakeholder-driven design work across contexts.