Michael Spires

Research Development Officer
Supports CAS, OUWB SOM, ERI

Michael Spires, M.A., M.S., is the research development officer for the College of Arts and Sciences and the Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine at Oakland University. As one of the research development officers at Oakland, Mr. Spires supports faculty needing assistance seeking external support for their research, scholarship, and creative artistry.

Spires holds a Bachelor of Arts (cum laude) in chemistry and classics from Knox College, a private liberal-arts college in west central Illinois. He also holds three master’s degrees: a Master of Arts in classics from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a Master of Science in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a second Master of Arts in modern European history from Northern Illinois University. He has additional graduate coursework in philosophy, theology, and doctoral work in history. His research interests in classics include Greek drama and both Greek and Latin poetry; in history, he specialized in the two world wars and the interwar years, with secondary interests in medieval history, the history of gender and sexuality, citizenship and nationalism. He has presented original research at meetings of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South and at the “Spaces of War in the French and Francophone World” conference at the University of Minnesota, and published book chapters on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

Mr. Spires has worked in research development and research administration since 2006: first at Northern Illinois University, then the Smithsonian Institution, and finally the University of Colorado at Boulder before coming to OU in 2017. He has primarily supported investigators in the physical, mathematical, and life sciences, the humanities and, to a lesser extent, the social sciences. He has consulted for a number of organizations, including Roosevelt University, the University of Northern Iowa and, as part of the consultants program of the National Organization of Research Development Professionals (NORDP), North Carolina Agricultural & Technical University and the National Science Foundation’s EPIIC and HBCU-ARC programs.

Since 2012, Spires has been an active member of NORDP, serving on the organization’s board of directors from 2014-2018 and as the organization’s president from 2017-18. He has also been on the nominating committee, the conference committee and the executive conference committee, and is a founding member of the New Opportunities in Research Development (NORD) Committee. He was co-chair of NORDP’s 2017 Research Development Conference, and has been a reviewer of abstracts for the annual meeting, and also for the NORD Committee, for many years. Since 2021, he has been an expert with the Program for External Evaluation of Research Development (PEERD) and, since 2023, a founding member of the editorial board for Research Development Review. He has also reviewed proposals for NASA, the United States Department of Education, and numerous institutional and inter-institutional funding programs. He has also served on the executive committees for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder and the Friends of the Northern Illinois University Libraries.

Mr. Spires has published on topics related to research development and research administration in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the SRA Catalyst, and for the PEERD program, and made presentations at multiple conferences for the Society of Research Administrators International and for NORDP.

Michael Spires CV