When you’re in charge of dispensing tens of millions of dollars in external research funding, facilitating collaboration between hundreds of investigators and stakeholders, and ensuring all regulatory, ethical and compliance requirements for a research enterprise are filed accurately and on time, you’re going to need an app for that.

At Lakehead, that app is the ROMEO Research Portal, an online database for digital management and reporting of internal and external research funding and ethics certifications.

Introduced in 2009, Lakehead investigators and research administrators can now use ROMEO for everything from filing ethics applications and reports to finding information on internal funding opportunities to workflow applications. For Research Services staff, ROMEO provides an efficient and integrated platform for overseeing, reporting and communicating about Lakehead’s research enterprise.

“Any researcher at Lakehead can access information about their own funding and certifications back to 2009, as well as apply online for a number of awards and certifications,” explains Bonnie Knott, Administrative Officer in the Office of Research Services and the university’s lead contact for ROMEO. “For those of us in research administration, it gives us a way to quickly and efficiently build reports on any number of research data, find information across departments, and track progress and activity on all our funded research.”

And with many other Canadian universities also adopting ROMEO as their digital research management system, it makes for seamless collaboration and project management between institutions.

Supported in part by Lakehead’s Research Support Fund grant, ROMEO is just one of the many ways the Office of Research Services facilitates research and innovation, scholarly activity and translation of research results at Lakehead.

“Our mandate in Research Services is to implement Lakehead’s strategic research priorities by providing the highest quality research administration and ethics support to investigators, so they can in turn realize the full potential of excellence in their research and innovation programs,” says Anne Klymenko, Director of Research Services at Lakehead. “We’re really proud to support the growth of Lakehead’s dynamic research enterprise as one of Canada’s top research-intensive universities.”

“The Research Support Fund is a critical way we can fulfill our mandate and ensure we can continue to support a growing research enterprise across many disciplines at the highest standards achievable,” adds Klymenko, who has overseen Lakehead’s research enterprise as it tripled in the last decade alone.

The Research Support Fund is a federal funding program for post-secondary institutions in Canada to support some of the costs associated with managing research funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In 2015/16, Lakehead University received $1.9 million from the Research Support Fund for the indirect costs of its tri-agency funded research.