This grant provides funds to bolster the efforts of an established consortium of Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), the Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI). CAHSI is dedicated to advancing Latina/o/x representation in computer science, a discipline lacking in diversity (by gender and race/ethnicity), especially at the graduate level. CAHSI pulls together more than 60 two- and four-year Hispanic Serving Institutions to learn from one another and to work with industry, non-profit, and other partners to raise computing degree attainment by Latina/o/x students. With much success behind them, CAHSI leadership is expanding its focus from undergraduate to graduate education pathways.Funds from this grant will support a series of activities designed to develop multilevel shared responsibility across the network, build multidimensional structures and cultivate a talent development mindset at CAHSI member institutions. Moreover, the project is poised to capitalize on a growing number of R1 (i.e., very high research productivity) HSIs, including through CAHSI’s involvement in the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities (HSRU), whose goals are to double the number of Hispanic doctoral students and increase by 20% the number of Hispanic faculty in their universities by 2030.

As of January 2022, Illinois state law guarantees admission to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for all students from the Community College of Chicago system with a cumulative GPA of at least 3.0. This grant supports a partnership between UIUC and Wilbur Wright College, a Hispanic Serving community college in Chicago, to help Wilbur Wright students take advantage of this new law, increase the number of Wilbur Wright students who transfer to UIUC, and enhance the educational resources available to these students, particularly those interested in STEM, so that they are well-prepared to succeed as their education continues.Primary activities funded through this grant include presentations for Wilbur Wright students and workshops for Wilbur Wright faculty on transfer and graduate opportunities; the launch of a one-week summer exploration program for Wilbur Wright students at UIUC; expanded professional development offerings and supports for Wilbur Wright students in the Transfer Pathways program, an annual STEM conference at Wilbur Wright; and sponsorships for 8-10 Wilber Wright students per year to participate in UIUC’s GearUp engineering education enrichment program. In addition, UIUC will use qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze lessons learned and promising practices from the collaboration and disseminate them to inform similar partnerships at other universities.

The Institute for Research on Innovation in Science (IRIS) maintains a dataset linking university grant and HR/procurement data with scholarly publications. That data has become essential infrastructure for the growing research community focused on measuring scientific productivity and the return on public and private investments in science. This grant funds efforts by Jinseok Kim and Jason Owen-Smith to expand this database by adding in linkages to research software, creating a new resource that can be used to begin to quantify the role software plays in scientific productivity. Unlike publications and patents, software doesn’t necessarily have well-curated author lists, and citations to software codebases are not necessarily well-structured for data mining. On the other hand, versioning platforms like Github have much more granular data on the specific contributions by individuals to codebases over time, which could enable very detailed analyses on who does what kinds of software work.In order to enable research on individual contributions to software as products of research, the IRIS team will identify relevant software repositories and link contributor usernames to the faculty, students, and staff who are represented in university records. Kim will identify software referenced in a corpus of papers, then develop algorithmic ways to match the names of software projects with active Github repositories. Next, he will use a set of name disambiguation methods to link contributors to those repositories with people already represented in the IRIS data, in the process linking those repositories and contributions to funding and other IRIS entities.

Computational modeling is a key tool for a number of scientific disciplines, but good practices in software engineering are not necessarily adopted by the developers of those models. To take one example, interoperability can be especially important to modeling, as the linking of models can be critical to particular research questions, but many models aren’t released with the metadata necessary to make this possible.Funds from this grant support the two years of activities at the Open Modeling Foundation (OMF), a modeling standards organization, aimed at advancing best practices in scientific modeling. The OMF’s activities are structured through three working groups: a Standards working group that will develop and maintain community-driven recommendations for computational modeling; a Certification working group that will develop methods to affirm when models meet those standards; and an Education and Training working group that will develop and maintain curricula to encourage best modeling practices by the broader scientific community with a particular focus on students and early career researchers. Each working group has an initial chair who will recruit one or more co-chairs within the first year, with a particular eye toward diversifying the OMF leadership.