Vanderbilt University, Fisk University, and Wake Forest University will collaborate to develop, study and refine a model to recruit, retain and advance historically underrepresented minority (URM) women from doctoral degree attainment to postdoctoral fellowship to tenured track positions in STEM. This alliance was created in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation (NSF 16-552) The AGEP program seeks to advance knowledge about models to improve pathways to the professoriate and success of URM graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in specific STEM disciplines and/or STEM education research fields. AGEP Transformation Alliances develop, replicate or reproduce; implement and study, via integrated educational and social science research, models to transform the dissertator phase of doctoral education, postdoctoral training and/or faculty advancement, and the transitions within and across the pathway levels, of URMs in STEM and/or STEM education research careers.
As our nation is confronted with a STEM achievement gap between URM and non-URM undergraduate and graduate students, our universities and colleges struggle to recruit, retain and promote URM STEM faculty who serve as role models and academic leaders for URM students to learn from, to work with and to emulate. Recent NSF reports indicate that URM STEM associate and full professors occupy 8% of these senior faculty positions at all 4-year colleges and universities and about 6% of these positions at the nation's most research-intensive institutions. URM women hold smaller shares of these academic STEM positions and an increase in their representation is essential since female URM undergraduate students, enrolled in STEM majors, outnumber their male peers. The current AGEP project has potential to advance a model to improve the representation of URM women in STEM faculty positions, eventually providing URM STEM role models to a STEM undergraduate and graduate students at postsecondary academic institutions.
The project includes activities to transition postdoctoral fellows into faculty positions, or a postdoc-to-faculty bridge program, to provide junior faculty with mentoring and to assist junior faculty in developing strong scholarly identities. The integrated research will include cross-sectional surveys, three-year longitudinal surveys and small-group interviews to gain a better understanding of the processes facilitating the choices women and URMs make in their STEM careers. Variables to study include gender and race differences, social relationship influences, the academic-professional culture and the institutional context. Vanderbilt and Fisk Universities will institutionalize the key model interventions, stage the model components for implementation at Wake Forest University, and disseminate the model to the network of 40 institutions represented in the Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research. The National Academy of Science's Ford Foundation Diversity Fellows program will work with the alliance to identify and recruit promising postdoctoral associates for project participation. The Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest will conduct scale up and dissemination activities for the alliance. Formative and summative evaluation work will be performed by an external evaluation team, via a subaward from Vanderbilt to the Institute for Broadening Participation. An external advisory board will provide advice to the project team through annual consultation.
