The University of Miami's SEEDS (Scientists and Engineers Expanding Diversity and Success) initiative has two main objectives: 1) to implement innovative and proven programs for faculty recruitment and retention and 2) to use these to leverage a larger institutional commitment that will assure continuity and permanence of institutional change. UM is establishing a University-level SEEDS office as a focus for diversity programs across all three UM campuses, establishing a Best Practices Committee to assess equity in policies, funding an Interactive Theatre initiative to help educate academic populations in diversity issues, and sponsoring a comprehensive climate survey to identify gender and ethnicity issues at UM. The SEEDS office will orchestrate initiatives, develop a comprehensive website and work with the Best Practices Committee to educate departments, department chairs and search committees on diversity issues, efforts funded by UM. NSF funding will support seven programs, including five based on proven programs: SEEDS Networking, Senior Scholar Lectureships, Career Workshops, "You Choose" Leadership Opportunities and Mentoring Across Differences, and two novel programs: "Early Career Research Conferences" and "Working From Within For Departmental Transformation". These strategies draw from an extensive literature on gender and race equity in science and engineering to effectively recruit women and underrepresented minorities actively.
Taken together, these programs and activities capitalize on a critical period of faculty replacement and expansion at UM, when catalyzing recruitment and retention initiatives can significantly increase faculty diversity. The opportunity is substantial: UM now has 302 SEM faculty and anticipates more than 100 tenure-track SEM faculty searches in the next five years. UM is located in Miami, the gateway to the Americas, where the Hispanic success story is palpable at every turn, and where our undergraduates are 27% Hispanic and 10% African-American. However, our Science, Engineering and Mathematics faculty has only 5% underrepresented minorities. We thus have a substantial eagerness for recruiting and retaining women of color. Because Miami is particularly attractive for Hispanic peoples and since several of our research fields have a strong pipeline representation of Hispanic women, we expect a good measure of success in our efforts to learn about, celebrate, promote, recruit and retain Hispanic women.
Intellectual merit: SEEDS innovatively combines a focus on underrepresented minorities with proven and novel programs to both broadly engage an entire university community, and focally transform target departments. Novel "Early Career Research Conferences" showcase young women and underrepresented minority scientists in cutting edge research conferences, thereby directly promoting their careers and highlighting them for local and national searches. A novel "Working from Within" program combines an initiative to educate department chairs with an administrative advocacy and financial support of selected women faculty leaders who are armed with a "Transformational Toolkit" to remedy specific concerns within their own departments.
Broader impact: SEEDS will alleviate isolation, foster career development, educate the academic community and infuse changes in hiring and promotion institution-wide with a high probability of improved climate as well as increased hiring and retention of women and underrepresented scientists during a critical period of faculty expansion.
