This grant supports a new partnership between Rutgers-Newark (RU-NWK; a Hispanic Serving Institution) and Rutgers-New Brunswick (RU-NB) that seeks to create sustainable pathways to graduate education for underrepresented Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o students in the geosciences, one of the least diverse STEM fields in terms of both race/ethnicity and gender. Specifically, grant funds allow the program to recruit and train 15-20 undergraduates, 8-10 graduate students, and 20-30 faculty to act as mentors; host a two-week workshop involving fieldwork with geoscientists and engagement with stakeholders throughout New Jersey; host a series of anti-racist educational seminars; and host a series of mentoring workshops for faculty, including post-workshop activities for continuous learning. Mentoring will be provided by RU-NWK graduate students to RU-NB undergraduates, thus positioning the Minority Serving Institution as the leader on issues relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Monica Lam, professor of computer science and director of the Open Virtual Assistant Lab at Stanford, is building a new entrant to the virtual assistant market, one that differs significantly from existing assistants in three ways.  First, it is based on new, cutting-edge voice recognition technology developed in Lam’s lab that is more flexible and adaptable than the technology used by Google and Amazon. Second, Lam’s technology is privacy-preserving, keeping consumer data safely and securely out of the hands of private actors.  Third, Lam’s technology sits atop a fully open network, allowing any vendor to develop apps for the platform.  This is in stark contrast with the closed networks operated by Apple and Google. Funds from this grant will allow Lam and her team to continue to develop their technology, making improvements to accuracy and speed, the detection and handling of errors, and the handling of unexpected inputs.  In addition, grant funds will enable Lam to pilot the technology’s first real world application for consumers. 

The California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education (C-CIDE) is a network of faculty and administrators across doctoral-granting universities that aims to improve diversity in STEM graduate programs and the scientific workforce in California. This grant supports C-CIDE’s Julie Posselt who is seeking to expand the consortium’s efforts to the national level. Grant funds will allow Posselt to survey graduate schools across the country and facilitate partnership agreements with 10-15 universities and 3-5 STEM Ph.D. programs; engage in strategic planning with core staff, campus liaisons, steering committee members, and expert advisors to scale up C-CIDE to a national level; and test and refine new workshop content with its current partners.

This grant supports Luisa Buchman, Joey Shapiro Key, and Linda Simonsen at the University of Washington at Bothell (UWB), who are creating a bridge partnership with Heritage University (HU). The partnership between these two Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) seeks to provide a sustainable pathway to graduate education for Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o students, helping to dismantle systemic barriers that have led to persistent educational inequities. Grant funds provide paid summer research opportunities for eight HU students, paid research training for HU students prior to the summer research opportunities, place-based and Indigenous science workshops and activities, and guaranteed admission of HU students into bachelor’s and master’s programs at UWB.