Learn How UCLA’s Mobile Team Embeds with Researchers to Build Apps for Grant Projects and More

At UCLA’s Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC), we work in an embedded fashion with researchers on their grant projects. We partner with them from the ideation stage, working through their specific aims, co-developing their grant proposals and budget projections with them. We are often named investigators on these grants or even co-principal investigators. We design, develop and manage these grants' technology components, working in concert with our faculty researchers to use design thinking to create elegant and enjoyable research experiences for their study participants. In this way we are trusted research technology partners and can build a long-term rapport with our faculty researcher community. We partner with UCLA researchers, teaming up with them on all possible flavors of grants, including NIH grants, NIST grants, VA grants, NSF grants and even foundation-based grants, even including internal campus seed grants. We work to understand their research goals and then find the most expedient and optimized set of tools (typically connected into mobile apps) to deliver optimal research experiences for study participants. We will share examples of several research projects that have resulted in multiple phases of federally funded projects and also share the infrastructure components that we have been able to leverage to expand our team’s capabilities, including our mobile research app platform ZAP (or the Zenith App Platform).