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.

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.

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.

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.

This grant supports Mandл Holford, Jackie Faherty, and Ruth Cohen, three scientists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) who are spearheading a decadal project they are calling “2030STEM”. The initiative seeks to create changes in the STEM enterprise as it concerns building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment for BIPOC scholars. Housed at AMNH and lasting ten years, 2030STEM involves four focus areas simultaneously attempting systems level change: identifying, training and championing a cadre of Fellows; partnering with and seeking to extend the scale of existing successful equity and inclusion programs and organizations; creating financial incentives and access to capital for scholars of color in STEM and for collaborating institutions and companies that will be vested in the success of 2030STEM Fellows; and creating and implementing a novel and wide-reaching advocacy campaign to accelerate systemic change. As well as delivering results through these four focus areas during the ten-year projects, the team also intends for activities to be continued and developed through organizations with kindred missions.

The American Educational Research Association, in partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, EducationCounsel, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the Civil Rights Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill School of Law, is undertaking a comprehensive research project to synthesize a large multidisciplinary body of knowledge aimed at documenting and quantifying the multiple ways that various forms of structural and systemic racism harm individual students and their educational outcomes. The project team will look at four broad areas of scholarship: physiology, biology, and genomics; mental health; identity science (which includes the study of phenomena like stereotype threat and microaggressions); and educational access, infrastructure, and pedagogy.  Though each of these fields has well-documented findings on the individualized impacts of racism on student outcomes, no attempt has been made to provide a synthesis that brings this diverse body of findings into a comprehensive whole. The proposed synthesis promises to provide a vital evidence-based resource that can inform discussion among educators, policymakers, courts, and the public about what scientific consensus has to say about the individual discrimination-based harms suffered by students and how to tailor fair and equitable college admissions and other educational policies in ways that are both cognizant of and responsive to these harms.