The Center for Diverse Leadership in Science (CDLS) at UCLA is the nation’s first university center focusing on diversity in the environmental sciences. Founded in 2017, CDLS aims to create opportunities for underrepresented people to gain education and experience that equips them with leadership skills and to serve as a model of diversity and inclusion across the nation. This grant supports the center’s director, Aradhna Tripati, in expanding two of CDLS’ main objectives—partnering with Minority Serving Institutions to widen pathways to STEM education and organizing a fellowship program that trains future decision-makers working across a variety of academic fields. Grant funds will allow CDLS to further its leadership development program, strengthen relationships with its institutional partners, and develop its strategic, communications, and outreach activities.

Introductory undergraduate courses play an outsized role in steering women and students of color out of STEM majors. One recent study, reported in Talking about Leaving Revisited, found that 35% of all decisions to switch out of a STEM major could be attributed to these courses, with women leaving at significantly higher rates than men. What is less well understood, however, is what it is about these courses that cause such differential responses across race and gender. This grant funds a team led by Anne-Barrie Hunter at the University of Colorado, Boulder, to conduct a large ethnographic study of introductory STEM courses across six U.S. college campuses. Focusing on courses in mathematics, computer science, chemistry, and biology with high DFWI (grades D, F, withdrawal, or incomplete) rates, the research team will conduct 240 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with professors, administrators, instructional staff, and teaching assistants and then link the information collected with university data on student performance. Interviews will be structured to examine the role that individual—as well as departmental and institutional—incentives, beliefs, attitudes, and practices have on student outcomes with an emphasis on teaching practices. The ethnography promises to yield important, actionable insights into the mechanisms that lead to differential racial and gendered outcomes among STEM students.

This grant provides support for a series of interrelated activities designed to support and strengthen the economics department at Howard University, the nation’s leading producer of Black PhDs in economics and the only Historically Black College or University that offers a doctorate in economics. Over the three-year grant period, funds will be used to increase Howard’s capacity to recruit, educate, and graduate economics students through providing fellowship support for undergraduate students, doctoral students, and a post-doctoral researcher. In addition, grant funds will be used to augment and strengthen the resources of the Howard economics department, including an upgrade to the department’s computer lab and seminar facilities, the launch of a faculty development program, and the creation of a mentoring program that pairs students with dedicated faculty mentors.

This grant provides partial support for a study by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that will report on the current expert consensus about the influence of systemic racism in academia on the careers of individuals belonging to racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in the scientific, technical, and medical workforce. The Academies will assemble a study committee of top experts to commission papers that synthesize the collective body of scholarship on this issue; develop practical, evidence-based recommendations to address the challenges the scholarship identifies; surface gaps in our understanding; and recommend an ambitious research agenda aimed to fill those gaps. This 21-month consensus study is a partial response to a request made by the Chairwoman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Congresswoman Edie Bernice Johnson. The Academies will plan a diverse variety of outreach and dissemination activities designed to ensure the report and its recommendations are circulated widely among key stakeholders and decision-makers inside and outside academia.

The University Centers for Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) program is a series of three-year grants to eight universities around the country that are working to transform graduate education to better serve Black, LatinX, and Indigenous doctoral students in STEM fields.  Grant funds primarily provide direct support to graduate students to be used in support of their studies.  The remaining funds support a diverse but interrelated set of resources designed to create an inclusive, connected, and supportive educational environment conducive to successful doctoral completion and subsequent career success.  These include faculty and peer mentoring, networking events, professional development seminars and resources, access to resilience counseling, a five-week research immersion program for incoming graduate students, and much more.   This grant provides three years of continued support to the UCEM housed at Duke University.  In addition to continuing its prior activities, the Duke UCEM team plans to implement new initiatives over the three year grant term to bring more academic departments at Duke into the UCEM and to further institutionalize the center’s recruitment and support activities as core functions at the university. The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering acts as the Foundation’s partner and fiscal steward for the program: verifying student eligibility, administering stipends, and collecting and tracking data on UCEM expenditures and outcomes.