The Association for Women in Science seeks funding to organize and host the 2009 meeting of the ADVANCE Principal Investigators (PI). Our goal is to organize a 2.5day meeting from September 30 to October 2, 2009 for PIs of ADVANCE IT, ADVANCE PAID, and ADVANCE IT-Catalyst grants and include a broader audience of the leadership of professional discipline related societies as well other diversity stakeholders in the STEM disciplines.
INTELLECTUAL MERIT: A Program Committee will be appointed as soon as funding is secured. We have structured the Program Committee to include PIs of current ADVANCE awards, an NSF ADVANCE program officer, representatives of professional societies, members of the AWIS Board, and one at large member and have received confirmations from most of the individuals identified for membership. The Program Committee will be charged with developing a meeting within the broad outlines defined below; identify symposium topics and organizers as well as keynote speakers; develop an invitation list and dissemination plan to ensure broad participation from professional societies; and work with the grant PI on issues which affect the quality of the program (e.g. budget). In addition to a subcontract for the conference management, we seek funds to support AWIS staff involvement in the project; travel for members of the management team to DC for one preconference meeting; and office expenses. We anticipate that our outreach to new constituencies may require targeted travel support. Many of the largest and most influential professional societies are based in the Washington DC area; however, the society officers are STEM academics located throughout the nation. We have therefore budgeted for travel grants to support involvement of up to 40 individuals who will be either representatives of minority serving institutions or society officers.
BROADER IMPACTS This project is novel in that it is designed to carry the innovations funded by the ADVANCE program and the insight gleaned from research into an expanded realm, to new audiences that influence the national conversation on how to meet the coming challenge of providing a technical workforce for US industry, higher education, government, and other work sectors. AWIS will leverage its already established liaison network with the discipline-related professional societies to extend the dissemination and adoption of strategies to improve recruitment and retention of women and underrepresented minorities. Professional societies are the logical first audience for this initiative, both because they play a central role in the advancement of women in STEM and because AWIS has recently assumed a lead role in convening disciplinary societies around diversity issues.
