For Institute & Center Administrators

Check the appropriate page on the FAO website to identify the documents needed to process transactions for these individuals:

• Postdoctoral Fellows
• Research Staff
• Research Visitors

Appointment transactions are generally submitted through OnBase. Access your unit's Research Staff Dashboard to check transaction and appointment status, and identify appointments expiring soon. 

Within FAO, Erin Elmore has primary responsibility for processing research staff appointments. If you have questions after reviewing the pages above, please contact Erin.

Institutes and centers based in Feinberg cannot appoint faculty; only Feinberg's academic departments can do so. Institutes and centers offer membership instead of appointments.

Institutes and centers that wish to recruit new faculty to campus should partner with an academic department. See department administrative contacts for academic appointments to learn with whom to collaborate. Standard faculty recruitment processes need to be followed for the type of faculty member being recruited:

• Investigator
• Team Scientist
• Clinician-Educator
• Research Faculty 

Given the interdisciplinary nature of institutes and centers, if you partner with a department to open a search and the finalist identified is better suited to a different department, it is possible to extend the offer via a different department, assuming relevant department chairs and institute/center directors are in agreement. 

Institute and center directors should be recruited through a search, which can be internal, external, or a combination of both. External searches generally will be coordinated by an academic department (or sometimes the Dean's Office, in the case of Feinberg institute directors). Internal searches may be conducted by institute/center leadership.

Please view this page on Recruiting Senior Administrative Leaders for more information, and notice the need to submit a search summary form for internal searches. The faculty director's title will be added to the faculty profile after review and approval of the form by FAO. 

Recognition and listing on the Feinberg Institutes and Centers page is at the discretion of the dean. Units listed on that page are eligible to register with the Faculty Affairs Office if:

• Their website is developed by the Feinberg Office of Communications
• They have a membership model, meaning (1) the director has a process/criteria for granting membership in the institute/center and (2) a membership coordinator is designated in the institute/center who is responsible for communicating membership updates to FAO 

Registration with the Faculty Affairs Office means:

• The institute/center is created in the FAO faculty database to enable membership tracking and central reporting on the membership roster.
• The unit and membership coordinator are added to the Center Membership Coordinators page of the FAO website.
• Feinberg faculty will be designated as members of the institute/center based on communication from the unit's membership coordinator. 
  • Individuals without faculty appointments in Feinberg do not appear in the FAO faculty database and therefore cannot be designated as institute/center members in this system. Therefore, units that grant membership to others (e.g., faculty outside of Feinberg, staff, students, etc.) need to develop their own method for tracking those individuals.
• For Feinberg faculty designated as members, the institute/center name will appear on their individual faculty profile in the Institutes and Centers panel.
• The list of Feinberg faculty designated as members in your unit will appear in a data feed which the Feinberg Office of Communications can use to create an automated members list on your website. Keep in mind that members who are not Feinberg faculty will not appear in this feed; if other members need to appear on your website, work with the Communications Team to develop another mechanism to supplement the automated list.

To request registration of a unit, please complete the Institute and Center Registration Form and send to fao@northwestern.edu. 

• Send membership updates to fao@northwestern.edu. 
• Report only membership changes for Feinberg faculty—i.e, additions of new members or removal of membership for someone.
  • Please don’t send your active membership roster periodically and ask us to reconcile it against our records. 
  • Don't report membership changes for people who do not have Feinberg faculty appointments (they aren't in the FAO database). You should only report membership changes to us for faculty who have Feinberg faculty profiles.
• Faculty who depart the institution will have their faculty profile automatically removed from public display once they leave, which also automatically removes them from your unit's list of active members.
• For IPHAM, IGH, and I.AIM, communication about adding members should distinguish primary and secondary center memberships (see next section).

There are a few large institutes at Feinberg that contain several centers, with faculty often holding memberships in more than one center in the same institute. These include:

• Institute for Public Health and Medicine
• Havey Institute for Global Health
• Institute for Augmented Intelligence in Medicine

For each of these institutes, FAO can record that a single faculty member has membership in multiple centers. This causes the faculty member to appear on the members list for the institute and on the members list for each of its centers in which membership is held.

However, Dean’s Administration has determined that an institute name should appear in the Institutes and Centers panel of an individual faculty profile only once. Listing multiple centers within the same institute gives the appearance of inflating the profile, so within the FAO faculty database, we can designate one center within the institute as the location of primary membership, while the other center memberships are treated as secondary. These are the implications for faculty profile display:

• If a Feinberg faculty member is designated as a member of the institute with no center specified, then the institute name will appear on the faculty profile: e.g., Institute for Augmented Intelligence in Medicine
• If a Feinberg faculty member is designated as a member of one center in the institute, that center will appear on the faculty profile in this format: Institute for Augmented Intelligence in Medicine - Center for Biomedical Informatics and Data Science
• If a Feinberg faculty member is designated as a member of multiple centers in the same institute, one of them can be designated as primary and then only the primary center displays on the faculty profile. If no primary center is designated when someone is a member of multiple centers in the same institute, then just the general institute name will appear on the profile.

If Feinberg Faculty Profiles are embedded in your website to make up your members list, you may have questions about how to update the content of the profiles:

• View the Quick Reference on Feinberg Faculty Profiles to understand the data sources that populate faculty profiles and how the data are updated.
• Institute/center administrators don't have access to systems that support profile maintenance, so faculty should work with the support staff where they hold their primary appointment if they need administrative assistance with their profiles.
• The faculty director of each Feinberg institute and center is tracked in the school's central faculty database, causing the role to appear in the title block of the faculty member's profile. Other faculty leadership titles within institutes and centers are not tracked centrally, but faculty can write about such leadership roles in the bios on their profiles.
• Member lists/profiles on unit websites refresh each night, so you can expect to see updates on your website one day after they appear on profiles found through the main profile site.