Office of Research & Creative Activity
Mission and Organization
The mission of the Office of Research & Creative Activity at Western Kentucky University is to provide outstanding support for the research, service, creative, and scholarly endeavors of our faculty, staff, and students. Our staff is dedicated to partnering with the university community to increase external support for these activities, while ensuring compliance with federal, state, and institutional regulations.
Our unit includes the Office of Sponsored Programs and the Office of Research Integrity. The Office of Sponsored Programs is a service unit that assists the faculty and staff at WKU in obtaining and administering external funds. The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) provides guidance to protect the rights, welfare, and security of individuals involved in research at WKU and its surrounding communities, ensuring compliance with federal, state, and local regulations.
ORCA also oversees a variety of programs and initiatives that provide support for research, creative and other scholarly enterprises at WKU including:
Ready to Apply?
Complete the Proposal Intent Form as soon as you decide to submit an external grant proposal. This notifies the OSP Pre-Award team, adds your proposal to our workflow, and allows us to begin providing guidance and support to help you submit a high-quality proposal that meets sponsor requirements.
Applied Research and Technology Program (ARTP)
The Applied Research and Technology Program (ARTP) fosters interdisciplinary research through centers that support collaboration across disciplines and beyond individual departments.
Stay Connected with ORCA
Read our annual newsletter highlighting research achievements, faculty accomplishments, and creative activity across WKU.
Western Kentucky University has been designated a Research Colleges and Universities (RCU) institution in the 2025 Carnegie Classifications! We are one of 216 institutions nationwide to receive this designation. Importantly, the RCU category is brand new, introduced as part of the first Carnegie Classifications release under a partnership between the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education (ACE), formed in 2022. This redesign created entirely new Research Activity Designations, meaning WKU's placement is part of a landmark update to the classification system—not a routine cycle.
The RCU designation recognizes institutions with $2.5M or more in average annual R&D spending that do not yet meet R1 or R2 doctoral production thresholds. For WKU, this is a significant milestone and could be interpreted as a natural steppingstone on our path toward an R2 designation. Because the RCU category is brand new, WKU's placement represents recognition of our research activity within a framework that, for the first time, formally acknowledges institutions like ours.
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