This grant supports professional development opportunities for graduate teaching assistants in the biology departments at the University of New Mexico and University of Colorado Denver, with a focus on inclusive teaching practices and equitable campus policy and practice. Under the leadership of Samantha Levine, this pilot program will build on learnings from the Student Experience Project, a national collaborative that engaged over 400 college STEM instructors to implement new equity-focused teaching practices in the classroom and measure subsequent changes in student experience and academic outcomes. Specifically, funds will allow Levine’s team to design and pilot training for 20-25 graduate teaching assistants per campus and design mechanisms that provide participants with course credit and/or payment for their participation. The insights gained from this pilot will be disseminated and used to inform similar programs at other higher education institutions.

This grant funds a project led by Nick Hilman at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Gresham Collom at St. Cloud State University to develop a comprehensive, publicly available dataset and web-based tool detailing current higher education policies and programs that offer financial support for Indigenous students. The dataset will include scholarships, grants, tax subsidies, and other college funding programs, such as tuition-free programs, available exclusively for Indigenous students at the federal, state, and postsecondary system and institutional levels in the United States. These outputs promise to provide an invaluable resource for academics, lawmakers, and tribal representatives alike for understanding the complex landscape of opportunities and obstacles faced by Americas Indigenous population when attempting to access higher education.

This grant provides ongoing support to Marionette Holmes at Spelman College who seeks to increase the number of Black women pursuing economics at the graduate level. is The Spelman College economics department is advancing a set of initiatives designed to instill an interest in economics as a profession and prepare students to succeed in graduate study and economics careers. Grant funds will allow Holmes and her colleagues to continue operating a summer bridge program for incoming freshmen aimed at strengthening participants’ core mathematical competencies; a distinguished speaker series featuring successful women of color who have made a career in economics; initiatives designed to improve the chances of successful application to an economics graduate program, including a journal club, GRE prep training, and a summer program that would provide economics research experience; and facilitated discussions of the challenges faced by women of color. The program will be supplemented with a scholarship fund that will ensure equal access to program offerings regardless of students’ economic circumstances. Grant funds will support these and associated administrative costs for three years.