The urgency of the Black Lives Matter protests and ongoing attention to racial justice has moved many National Academies into action—including the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). This grant supports Elizabeth Cady who, along with Percy Pierre, is shepherding work at NAE’s Racial Justice & Equity (RJ&E) Committee. The Committee’s objectives are to achieve a diverse engineering population; reverse disappointing trends of decreasing college enrollment and degree completion in engineering over the last 10 years; provide access to successful careers in engineering through nontraditional routes; and provide the necessary tools both to retain underrepresented minorities in engineering and enable them to thrive. Grant funds will allow Cady and Pierre to commission, oversee, and disseminate a landscape scan and literature review focused on five topical areas (increased awareness of racial injustice and inequity; mentoring for minority engineering students and early-career minority engineers; nondegree training for high-tech positions; development of data and relationships to support machine learning algorithms; and efforts to increase the participation of minorities in engineering and technology); develop a framework for action informed by the landscape scan and literature review; and then use this framework to inform the ongoing work of the RJ&E Committee.

This grant supports an emerging partnership between three public higher education institutions in Maryland: University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) and Bowie State University (BSU)—both Historically Black Universities—and the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP). This partnership seeks to identify obstacles deterring underrepresented Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o students from pursuing STEM graduate degrees, understand institutional biases that limit these students’ entry and degree completion, and develop a pathway for successful STEM graduate education.  Grant funds will allow the team to deploy surveys, conduct focus groups, and hold in-depth interviews of Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o students and alumni at all three institutions to explore and understand the root causes of barriers; identify 3-5 STEM UMCP departments/subfields in which to pilot the pathway; collect and analyze data to re-examine graduate admissions policies and requirements at UMCP; deploy surveys and interviews with faculty to assess perception of UMCP’s graduate STEM climate; deploy surveys and interviews with academic leadership at UMCP; create a memorandum of understanding to lay the foundation of institutional collaborations; and generate a report of findings to present to university leadership and administration.

This grant supports a budding partnership between Tuskegee University (a Historically Black University) and Columbia University that seeks to create sustainable pathways to graduate education for underrepresented minority students by expanding existing programs at Columbia to Tuskegee students. Specifically, grant funds allow the partnership to create a foundation for a biomedical engineering program at Tuskegee, drawing on the expertise of the Biomedical Engineering Department at Columbia; create a seed grants program for research collaborations between faculty at Tuskegee and Columbia, including funding a co-advised Master’s student at Tuskegee and encouraging that student to apply to a Ph.D. program at Columbia; create a new position for a Tuskegee alumnus in Columbia’s Bridge-to-the-Ph.D. program; augment and codify engineering design challenges involving Tuskegee and Columbia undergraduates; and dedicate four positions in the Amazon-Columbia Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program for Tuskegee students, who will also conduct co-advised research during the academic year at Tuskegee.