Portland State University is pleased to announce the appointment of Kendra Mingo as our new Strategic Research Development and Proposal Manager. Working with Annie Lindgren to launch the Research Development Office, she will provide knowledge and resources to support PSU faculty with research and career development.
Kendra brings a wealth of experience to this role, having worked in faculty support and proposal development for four previous universities. She is a Certified Research Administrator (CRA), a designation she earned from the Research Administrators Certification Council in 2015 and 2020. She has also been recognized for outstanding contributions to institutional success: she received the Alvan F. Waller Stewardship Award and four nominations for Employee of the Year at Willamette University, a University Excellence Outstanding Team Award at the University of Idaho, and a Staff Appreciation and Recognition (STAR) Award from the University of California (UC) San Diego. We are excited to benefit from her expertise and passion here at Portland State.
The best way to approach research development, Kendra believes, is to have strong partnerships across the university. She is deeply committed to the idea of partnering with faculty members to help them meet their research goals and be successful.
"Every faculty member's experience is different, and everyone's career trajectory and research program is different. So we have the opportunity to specialize our services for each faculty member, in support of what they're doing, and find ways to connect it to Portland State's mission and the broader strategic research plan that we have now. I really enjoy finding all of those connections, coming alongside faculty as a partner and being able to offer my expertise to them, just like they're offering their expertise to the university and to their students," Kendra said.
In addition to working to help faculty expand their research portfolios, Kendra will also support large-scale interdisciplinary proposal efforts, lending her expertise in collaborative facilitation, team science, faculty development, communication, and strategic planning. She has supported proposal development for a wide variety of federal and private funders and has a particular interest in creating and implementing research development programs to enhance institutional research capacity and grant competitiveness and readiness. She is also a co-lead on a National Science Foundation (NSF) Growing Research Access for Nationally Transformative Economic Development (GRANTED) award to design new materials, tools, and resources to enhance research support infrastructure at minority-serving institutions.
Kendra holds an MA in Environmental, Population, & Organismic Biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a BS in Biology from Lewis & Clark College. Most recently, before coming to Portland State, she served as proposal manager for UC San Diego's Office of Research and Innovation.