Arizona State University's key hypothesis is: "Providing incentives to qualified underrepresented minority (URM) students in a highly multidisciplinary environment and mentoring them to apply their knowledge and skills within centers engaged in societally-relevant problem solving will motivate them to move from a master's program to a doctoral program best suited for their intellectual goals." One of the most important incentives for students to enroll and succeed in the Master's Degree programs is the student support provided by the NSF Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) Bridge to the Doctorate (BD) program. With this support from the BD Fellowships, Arizona State University (ASU) will build and demonstrate a national model on how to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups (URGs) in STEM pursuing PhDs in quantitatively-driven Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines by emphasizing the use of high-level mathematics to analyze questions of global importance. Having other universities adopt this model nation-wide will greatly expand the number of underrepresented minority STEM professors and help the United States reach a critical mass of mathematicians and quantitatively-driven STEM scientists and engineers. A national focus of promoting globally important questions and mathematics as a tool to address them will lead to resolving the problem of underrepresentation in those STEM fields critical to our nation's competitiveness.
ASU's BD addresses the obstacles to obtaining a Ph.D. for students historically underrepresented in STEM through their program's three objectives: (1) Recruit from the overlap between ASU, LSAMP, and the Math Alliance pipelines; (2) Provide incentives to qualified URM students in the targeted disciplines to enter and succeed in STEM Master's Degree programs; and (3) Cultivate a strong self-identification as scientists and scholars en route to a Ph.D. Students in the BD program are assigned a faculty mentor with a quantitatively strong STEM research program as well as to their chosen advisor who serves as an explicit role model, provides oversight of their academic progress and offers cultural-emotional support that often make the difference in the success of URGs. ASU's BD program creates an environment where success, publications and earning advanced degrees are the norm.
