A strong faculty (more than half hired in the last 20 years) includes gifted teachers and research-active scholars, who received a record-breaking $22.4 million in external grant funding for the fiscal year 2020 – an amount that has been growing each year. Thanks to their work, in 2019 the University was designated by the Carnegie Classification as an R2 – Doctoral University – High Research Activity and by the state as a New Jersey Public Research University. The hallmark of the Montclair State faculty is that they were recruited to be, and they are, both talented and committed teachers and brilliant scholars, researchers and artists.
Research by faculty scientists and scholars is taking place around the globe – from discovering the earliest known draft of the King James Bible in England, to saving endangered lemurs in Madagascar to investigating Antarctic climate change – and helping solve the mysteries of space. Faculty are developing drug therapies for age-related memory loss, combating toxic algal blooms, examining racial bias and human trafficking, pioneering new methods for teaching math, and studying how coronavirus is affecting Latinx communities.
The University’s online institutional repository, Digital Commons, connects the research, scholarly and creative work of the University community to a global audience. It provides unlimited free access to some 6,000 scholarly publications and creative works, data sets and other materials produced by Montclair State’s faculty, staff and students, and it enables researchers and students to find collaborators. Uploaded work ranges from a dissertation on refugee resettlement in the U.S. to archives of the student-run Montclarion newspaper dating back to 1948. Traffic to Digital Commons has grown 31 percent in the last year, and people from 191 countries have visited. Additionally, Montclair State University is among six leading New Jersey universities contributing to “Research with NJ,” a scientific research database created to support the continued development of New Jersey’s innovation economy.
Research is funded by a growing and varied list of federal, state, local and private sponsors, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Justice, National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts.
The faculty’s growing reputation for research excellence enhances the University’s competitiveness and improves its ability to attract external grants and recruit high-quality faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students.
During the coronavirus pandemic, faculty in the performing arts, in the John J. Cali School of Music and in the Department of Theatre and Dance, turned the Red Hawk Parking Deck, the Amphitheater, and campus quads into outdoor rehearsal and performance spaces, and changed performances from live venues to broadcast performances.
Faculty include many recipients of NSF CAREER Awards, the most prestigious award in support of early career faculty in research and education, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (a “Genius Grant” awardee), two Emmy winners, a Pulitzer finalist, and nationally and internationally recognized experts on countless topics ranging from clean energy analytics to educational disparities to disease mechanisms and therapies to the neuroscience of second language acquisition.
During the coronavirus pandemic, in a year like no other, Montclair State’s faculty discovered innovative and safe solutions to sustain the University’s academic community with as much in-person, on-campus instruction and activities as possible under the circumstances. They are also actively engaged in helping New Jersey solve pressing COVID-related issues, including modeling the pandemic’s progression under different scenarios, helping K-12 teachers adapt to online delivery, addressing racial and ethnic disparities, and regularly sharing their expertise with the public in news media interviews.