The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is pleased to announce the latest grant recipients of the Exemplary Pathways to STEM Graduate Education initiative. 17 grants totaling more than $4.8 million will go towards building and continuing partnerships between Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs)[1] and other institutions with strong STEM graduate degree programs. This round of grants is the result of the 3^rd open call for Letters of Inquiry within the Exemplary Pathways initiative, launched in 2021.

Sloan grants aim to promote faculty-to-faculty collaboration on research, teaching, and other mutually beneficial endeavors that strengthen partners’ undergraduate and graduate STEM programs and widen student pathways to STEM graduate education, benefiting all students.

“Through these efforts and by leveraging the talent development expertise of MSIs, grantees are poised to design effective systems, engage in practices that remove educational barriers, and create opportunities in STEM graduate education so all students can thrive,” says Dr. Lorelle L. Espinosa, Program Director for grantmaking in Higher Education at the Sloan Foundation.

Taken together, MSIs enroll the most diverse students in the nation. More than 50% of students at MSIs receive Pell Grants, compared with roughly 30% of all college students, and more than half are the first in their families to attend college. It’s also the case that many MSIs are underresourced relative to peer institutions, yet the sector plays an outsized role in advancing economic mobility and sending their students, including their students of color, to graduate education.

A partnership between University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez (UPRM) and the University of Pittsburgh, for example, will facilitate collaborations on energy systems research. Both institutions have a strong focus on energy research and development, making them natural academic partners. However, damage caused by multiple hurricanes and frequent power outages has had adverse impacts on critical STEM research infrastructure in Puerto Rico. In light of these infrastructure challenges, part of this project’s funds will support UPRM master’s students to travel to Pittsburgh to complete their research. 

Another grant will support partnerships between Montana State University and four Tribal Colleges in Montana: Salish Kootenai College, Stone Child College, Blackfeet Community College, and Chief Dull Knife College. This partnership is unique in that it directs efforts towards creating pathways to STEM graduate education and research for Tribal College faculty. While 59% of Montana State University faculty have doctoral degrees, that number is closer to 12% at Montana Tribal Colleges. In addition to benefiting students at Montana State, boosting the number of PhD faculty at Tribal Colleges has the potential to greatly strengthen teaching expertise at those schools. Another facet of the project aims to prepare interested Montana State students for future Tribal College faculty positions by connecting them with Tribal Colleges, their faculty, and other experts on Indigenous education.

As in previous years, there are also grants to develop and expand curricular offerings at MSIs. One new partnership involves Howard University, Spelman College, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The partnership will allow the faculty of these institutions to collaboratively develop a newly designed introductory course in data science and economics based on a similar universally available offering of MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative. The new curriculum leverages a flipped-classroom design, where, prior to class, Howard and Spelman students will engage with asynchronous materials designed by MIT and then use in-person class time for hands-on activities and instruction from their own faculty. This design allows for in-person time to focus on problem-solving for culturally relevant issues of most interest to Howard and Spelman students.

In addition to awards for new partnerships like these, grants in this round have also been awarded to project teams which have previously received funding and are now working to scale their efforts.

One such project involves a network of institutions, including the University of Notre Dame, University of New Mexico–Gallup, California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Salish Kootenai College, and University of Colorado Denver. Faculty in this partnership have collaborated to develop a publicly available environmental data science curriculum which honors traditions and knowledge that exist within Indigenous communities. Follow-on grant funding will allow the team to develop similar courses on data visualization and remote sensing. Taken together, these courses have the potential to broaden expertise in Indigenous STEM education and promote stewardship of Tribal land through cutting-edge science.

“Expanding institutional pathways to graduate programs is crucial if we are to ensure equal opportunity in the STEM research enterprise for all,” says Dr. Espinosa.

A full list of the projects funded through this call is available here.

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The Sloan Foundation’s Exemplary Pathways to STEM Graduate Education initiative develops and supports institutional pathways from US-based Minority Serving Institutions to master’s and doctoral degree programs in science and science-related fields.

[1] Established by Congress, MSIs are a federally defined category of higher education institutions either explicitly founded with a mission of educating students from historically marginalized groups or whose enrollment features a significant population of such students.