One relatively niche but extremely important case of scientific collaboration is the “decadal survey”, the process by which some research disciplines reach consensus on field-level priorities for the next ten years. In disciplines where instruments and missions are highly capital-intensive, these decadal surveys play a critical role in guiding much spending and research funding across public and private sources. The decadal process generally plays out over several years through a series of local and then international convenings, and consensus is gradually reached through deliberative discussion, argument, coaxing, side conversations, and iterative production of documents until delivery of a final report. This grant supports Janet Vertesi and David Reinecke, two sociologists, who are studying how coronavirus-forced adoption of virtual meeting and collaboration technologies has affected the decadal survey processes of three fields: planetary science, heliophysics, and astrophysics. Using a combination of interviews, archival research, and ethnographic observation, Vertesi and Reinecke will document how pandemic-focused remote work changed the survey process in these three fields--what worked better and what worked worse—with an eye towards articulating how to improve online collaboration technologies in ways that increase the benefits and decrease the costs of using them for discipline-wide scientific collaboration.

This grant supports Michael Samuelian at Cornell University, who organized an Urban Tech Summit at the university’s Roosevelt Island campus in fall 2021. An initiative by SmartCities New York, the event aimed to support the development, adoption and evaluation of technologies that make cities more connected, livable, efficient, and accessible. Grant funds contributes to the overall expenses for running the event, where researchers, practitioners, advocates, and industry leaders in the urban tech space came together to present findings, network, identify common challenges, and forge new collaborations for future urban tech projects.

This grant supports Linda Hyman, Veronica Martinez-Acosta, and Jennifer Morgan at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), who are seeking to expand MBL’s existing partnerships with Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) across the country, in service of providing sustainable pathways to graduate education in various STEM disciplines for Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o students. Specifically, the team is seeking to incorporate successful elements of Boston University’s (BU) Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP)—an existing pre-doctoral program which may serve as a model for the program in development—into their own pre-doctoral program. Grant funds support various activities within this effort, allowing the team to hire an external evaluator to consult on the planning activities; conduct a site visits to participating MSI campuses; host a focus group of scholars and faculty from Boston PREP; host a virtual meeting to gain insights from other PREP programs across the country; and develop the necessary elements of the envisioned pre-doctoral program, including a name, scope, curriculum, plans for evaluation, recruitment and marketing, sustainability and dissemination, theory of change, and key metrics for outcomes.

This grant supports Demetris Geddis at Hampton University, who is coordinating a partnership between Hampton and Brandeis University to provide opportunities to underrepresented Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o students. Specifically, Geddis is spearheading a pilot program that will select eight junior Hampton students, provide them with a research experience before their senior year, and ultimately matriculate the cohort into STEM graduate programs at Brandeis. Grant funds support this pilot program, which includes a ten-week paid research internship at Brandeis for all students, near-peer mentorship and workshops on graduate school, a senior course to prepare the students for graduate study, and admission into a STEM-intensive Brandeis master’s program—complete with full scholarship, stipend, and an assigned mentor to make sure that every participating student is well-placed to succeed in graduate school.