This workshop is designed to encourage retention and advancement of qualified women and underrepresented minority engineering educators in pursuit of scientific and engineering challenges. The workshop will bring together a select group of 80 of the nation's outstanding engineering educators. Participants will be underrepresented and minority engineering educators who predominately have been in tenure track positions for less than five years or are in the last year of their Ph.D. program and actively pursuing tenure track academic positions. The participants will be employed in teaching and/or research positions and actively developing their own unique research programs. Specific workshop goals are to: ! Foster technical and intellectual exchange among Ph.D. level, underrepresented and minority engineers who are or desire to be engineering educators; ! Instill in its participants the sense of a technical community in which they can thrive and to which they can contribute; and ! Increase participant awareness of research and funding opportunities. The workshop will consist of ten formal sessions spread over a three-day period. The workshop will open with a presentation in which integration of research and education will be emphasized. This will be followed with detailed presentations on funding opportunities from technical program managers representing agencies such as NSF, ARO, AFOSR, ONR, DARPA, and NASA. A panel of university deans will discuss their perspectives on reasonable career expectations and demands. The deans' panel will be set up to include discussion of issues related to tenure, teaching, research, publications, funding, outreach and a rewarding personal life along the career path of an engineering educator. Role models selected based on their outstanding technical abilities and successful careers will be invited to give technical presentations, blended with personal and professional insights, and will be available for discussion with younger participants throughout the workshop. All participants will give a brief summary of their current research interests, increasing fellow participants' awareness of the diversity of related opportunities for involvement in different research areas. Participants will attend several working sessions on topics ranging from diversity issues to preparing successful grant proposals and tours of national research laboratory test facilities. Each day will close with a reception or banquet organized to promote discussion and networking among participants. The workshop proceedings will summarize the recommendations from the working session discussions, provide a workshop outcomes assessment and recommendations statement, and include a two page abstract from each participant that describes their research interests. The envisioned short-term significance and benefits of the workshop are threefold: enhanced participant awareness of what is required to be successful in academe (teaching, publishing, outreach, etc.), diversification of participants' research program goals, and development of a network of mentors and peers who encounter similar challenges in advancing within academe. The envisioned long-term significance and benefits of the program are improved retention of women and underrepresented minority engineers as active researchers, mentors, and instructors in engineering education, and increased diversity in the undergraduate engineering student population as a result of a more diverse engineering faculty.
