OVPR Units

The Office of the Vice President for Research oversees a variety of interdisciplinary units that collaborate with faculty, staff, students and external partners to catalyze, support and safeguard research and scholarship activity.

Learn more about OVPR Leadership and Staff

Catalyze Research

Bold Challenges

A two-year strategic endeavor that integrates social and technical sciences from across U-M to address societal challenges that intersect equity, health, infrastructure and sustainability.

Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center

A collaboration between Flint community partners, U-M, UM-Flint and Michigan State University that aims to address, through coordinated research efforts, Flint’s current and future health challenges.

Institute for Energy Solutions

A research institute, co-sponsored by the College of Engineering and the Office of the Vice President for Research, that fosters collaboration across U-M and beyond in an effort to accelerate an equitable transition to a more sustainable energy future.

Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention

A research institute that engages the breadth of expertise across U-M, with input from nonacademic stakeholders, to generate knowledge and advance solutions that will decrease firearm injury across the United States.

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

IRWG stimulates, coordinates and supports research and other creative activities from members of the U-M community who use the lens of women, gender and sexuality to advance their work.

​Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering

MICDE serves as a focal point for the wide spectrum of research in computational science and engineering at U-M.

Michigan Institute for Data & AI in Society

MIDAS strengthens the university’s preeminence in data science and artificial intelligence, and enables its transformative use in a wide range of research disciplines to achieve lasting societal impact.

Michigan Israel Partnership for Research and Education

A collaboration that supports meritorious research, fosters innovation spurs collaboration between U-M, Weizmann Institute of Science and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in the areas of human health and biomedicine, leveraging complementary expertise and collaborative partnerships.

Michigan Program for Advancing Cultural Transformation

U-M launched the Michigan Program for Advancing Cultural Transformation (M-PACT) with a five-year, $15.8 million grant from the National Institutes for Health Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (NIH FIRST) initiative, along with a $63.7 million university investment in June 2023. The mission of M-PACT is to achieve greater inclusive excellence in the biomedical and health sciences at the University of Michigan and beyond.

MI Hydrogen

A joint venture by the Office of the Vice President for Research, the College of Engineering and the School for Environment and Sustainability, MI Hydrogen fosters collaboration among U-M researchers, community groups, and government and industry partners to address knowledge gaps and develop strategies to help society transition toward an energy future that is equitable, affordable, clean and secure.

Opioid Research Institute

U-M is focused on taking Action to Save Lives by addressing the opioid epidemic in Michigan and across the U.S. through Collaboration with communities and policymakers, and using Evidence-based Strategies.

Quantum Research Institute

The QRI is a joint venture among the Office of the Vice President for Research, the College of Engineering, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. With support from the Office of the Provost, the institute aims to strengthen research collaborations among U-M faculty, industry partners, and government agencies.

Support Research

Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H)

Supports transformative research to drive biomedical and health breakthroughs – ranging from molecular to societal – to provide transformative health solutions for all. A new component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ARPA-H is authorized with a budget of $1 billion for Fiscal Year 2023.

Business Operations

An OVPR team that manages important operational resources, ranging from finance and human resources to information technology and grants administration.

Consulting for Statistics, Computing and Analytics Research

CSCAR provides individualized support and training to U-M researchers in a variety of areas relating to the management, collection and analysis of data.

Faculty Honorifics Office

The Faculty Honorifics Office seeks to bolster recognition for U-M researchers by increasing the number, diversity, and quality of our nominations through better coordination, sharing best practices across the institution, and ensuring equitable nomination processes.

Federal Relations for Research

An OVPR team, based in Washington, DC, that advocates and coordinates federal interactions for the U-M research enterprise, keeping Congress, the executive branch, federal agencies, research organizations, professional societies and public policy organizations apprised of the achievements, needs and opportunities arising from the research community.

Innovation Partnerships

An OVPR unit that serves as a central hub to lead U-M research commercialization efforts by supporting technology commercialization and startup company growth, as well as creating and fostering corporate research alliances.

Public Engagement and Research Impacts

The Public Engagement & Research Impacts team supports scholars in amplifying the public impacts of their research. Emphasizing interdisciplinarity, equity, and reciprocal partnership, the PERI team hosts workshops and connects researchers with engagement opportunities across U-M, develops functional tools to help faculty and practitioners maximize their impacts, and consults on the societal impact sections of funding proposals. 

Research Analysis & Data Integration Office

RADIO analyzes and integrates many types of data to serve, support and strengthen U-M’s research, scholarly and creative enterprise.

Research Communications

An OVPR team that develops and implement communications and marketing strategies to promote the impact and importance of U-M research and scholarship, while also generating awareness around important matters that impact the university research community.

Research Cores Office

Explore the many services, equipment, and instrumentation that the University of Michigan offers across campus in its core facilities.

Research Data Stewardship Initiative

RDSI supports U-M researchers in managing and sharing their research data to improve the transparency, rigor and impact of academic research.

Research Foundation Partnerships Office

The Research Foundation Partnerships Office supports collaborations between U-M faculty and leadership and non-profit funders who align with the university’s research mission. The office positions faculty members and research-centric centers and initiatives to identify, engage with and ultimately gain support from non-profit funding partners to advance the mission.

Office of Research Development

An OVPR team that strives to connect researchers to resources and increase its investigators’ competitiveness in obtaining extramural research funding by coordinating internal funding programs, matching faculty to funding opportunities, offering workshops for skill-building, developing online resources and facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations.

Strategic Intelligence

The Strategic Intelligence team supports long-term and advance planning to increase competitiveness for extramural research funding. The team focuses on forecasting, analysis and early engagement to position U-M research teams to successfully pursue large-scale funding.

Safeguard Research

Animal Care & Use Office

Comprised of three units that touch virtually every facet of animal care and use at the U-M. Together, the Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee (IACUC); the Animal Care & Use Office (ACUO); and the Unit for Laboratory Animal Medicine (ULAM), partner with the U-M research community to foster a culture of sustained excellence, compassionate care, and shared responsibility for upholding the highest animal welfare standards in all aspects of research, testing, and teaching.

Conflict of Interest

A research compliance program that provides oversight of, and the procedural structure for, outside activity disclosure, the review of potential conflicts of interest, and the management of identified conflicts in research, sponsored projects and technology transfer.

Controlled Substances in Research

An OVPR team that ensures compliance with federal and state regulations pertaining to controlled substances in the research setting at U-M, including controlled substances that are associated with animal research, administered to human subjects as part of a research protocol and used for in vitro or analytical research.

Export Controls

An OVPR program that assists in identifying and managing export control issues, while also ensuring compliance with export control laws, which govern how technology, technical data, technical assistance, and items or materials are physically or electronically exported, shipped, transmitted, transferred or shared from the U.S. to foreign countries, persons or entities.

Human Pluripotent Stem Cells

The U-M Human Pluripotent Stem Cell research compliance program provides oversight of the ethical issues related to the derivation and research use of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) at the university.

Human Research Protection Program

HRPP, which oversees the U-M Institutional Review Boards and its Office of Research Compliance Review, works on behalf of the university to ensure its overall commitment to safeguarding human research participants.

Institutional Biosafety Committee

An OVPR-led committee that is responsible for assessing the biosafety containment level for research involving recombinant DNA and synthetic nucleic acid molecules, while also overseeing research with other potentially hazardous biologics.

International Engagement

OVPR works with faculty, staff and students to develop best practices that ensure successful research collaborations with international partners, while maintaining the highest standards in pursuit of new knowledge and complying fully with the federal regulations and guidelines that govern research and scholarship.

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act

An OVPR unit that works to meet both the letter and the spirit of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which is a U.S. federal law that mandates the transfer of human remains and associated funerary objects, unassociated funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony to lineal descendants, Indian tribes, or Native Hawaiian organizations who have requested them and who have the legal right to them.

Office of Research and Sponsored Projects

ORSP ​safeguards and advances the U-M research enterprise by providing its partners with effective and efficient pre-award and non-financial post-award services for the compliant administration of externally sponsored grants, contracts and ancillary agreements.

Research Integrity

An OVPR program that advises the research community about how to conduct research responsibly and investigates allegations of research misconduct, including fabrication, falsification and plagiarism.

Research Information Security

An OVPR program that works to ensure university compliance with controlled unclassified information, which is federal, non-classified information the U.S. Government creates or possesses (or that a nonfederal entity receives, possesses or creates for, or on behalf of, the government) that requires information security controls to safeguard or disseminate.