With the goal to address the severe national shortage in the number of domestic members of underrepresented populations (i.e., African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders) pursuing doctoral degrees in the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Program was initiated by the NSF in 1998. During the last 7 years, the program has grown from few alliances in 1998 to 27 AGEP alliances nationwide in 2005. While these AGEP alliances are required to collaborate amongst themselves in order to better fulfill the program goals, transaction costs and financial constraints prevent them from collaborating more effectively on a regional or national basis. This limitation may hinder the full potential and growth of the AGEP Program because individual alliances may miss out on opportunities for the identification and sharing of best practices and lessons learned from other AGEP alliances. The purpose of this project is to explore the degree to which the strategic deployment of cyberinfrastructure can broaden and deepen collaboration amongst AGEP alliances in NY State, as a pilot study, and to lay the empirical foundation for a larger proposal to strengthen the national integration of AGEP alliances. Intellectual Merit: To accomplish these goals for enhanced collaboration and sharing of best practices and resources throughout the national AGEP community, we have designed our study to be implemented in two phases: The focus of Phase One will be to build a pilot collaboratory for the emerging partnership of the New York AGEP alliances. This pilot NY AGEP Collaboratory will serve as the prototype of a National AGEP Collaboratory that may be proposed after evaluation of the pilot data. In Phase Two of the proposed project, we will expand membership in the pilot collaboratory to the remaining three AGEP alliances on the East Coast. Again, this pilot East Coast AGEP Collaboratory will help us to learn valuable lessons as we plan for a proposed National AGEP Collaboratory project. Guided by literature on the development of Cyberinfrastructure and Collaboratories, we propose to study the three overarching domains around collaboratory practices. We characterize these domains as: (1) people-to-people; (2) people-to-information; and (3) people-to-facilities. Each of these domains is critical to the needs of the AGEP alliances. Formative and summative evaluation of the pilot study will be undertaken to provide the analysis that will help in making decisions about the subsequent phases of the project, leading up to the national AGEP Collaboratory. Areas that will be evaluated include administrative capacity, planning and research, affiliate capacity building, and enhancing outreach capacity. Broader Societal Impacts: In addition to the project's direct impact on the participating AGEP alliances in terms of building their capacities and increasing their efficiency to facilitate the achievement of their objectives to support the development of more members of underrepresented populations achieving the doctorate in the STEM disciplines and entering the professoriate, the project has broader impact at regional and national levels. The universities and their student populations in general will benefit from increased opportunities for collaboration amongst the participating universities, including brown bags, courses, seminars, and research opportunities. These technologies will make it easier to engage local communities in research activities where relevant. Nationally, the lessons learned form this project can be applied not only to the future AGEP collaboratory, but to other loose networks and alliances of interdisciplinary and multi-institutional actors.
