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.

Under the leadership of Michelle Barker, the Research Software Alliance (ReSA) is an organization devoted to ensuring that software is taken seriously as a research output alongside more traditional outputs like peer-reviewed papers and datasets.  Since software of all kinds is essential to nearly every aspect of scientific research, properly valuing and rewarding those who produce and maintain such software is vital to the efficient functioning of the systems of scientific knowledge production. ReSA will convene an international forum to help the science funding community better circulate strategies and approaches for the effective support of scientific software. Grant funds allow ReSA, with support from a part-time community manager, to establish this funders’ forum and produce resources covering relevant topics such as analyses of the research software funding landscape, key drivers for increased recognition of research software, and approaches to grantmaking practices and impact evaluations of investments. Following the forum, ReSA will share insights gained through blogs, white papers, and articles that further elevate the profile of research software across the research community.

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.

This grant supports computer scientist Rediet Abebe at the University of California, Berkeley and economist Maximilian Kasy at the University of Oxford, who are organizing the Association for Computing Machinery’s inaugural conference focused on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization—EAAMO 2021. The virtual conference will convene experts from academia, government, and industry working on the computational tools and relevant economic or social science research required to address urgent societal problems. EAAMO 2021 seeks to foster community-bridging collaborations for addressing issues such as access to education and healthcare, interventions for alleviating poverty, as well as policies to promote fairness and privacy in labor markets.