Erin Golembewski, Ph.D. - US grants

The University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) is the lead institution for PROMISE AGEP, a university system-wide effort for the state of Maryland to facilitate underrepresented STEM graduate student and postdoctoral professional development and pathways to careers. UMBC leads the alliance that consists of all 14 colleges, universities, and regional education centers in the University System of Maryland, four community colleges, and a former NSF Model Institution of Excellence Hispanic Serving Institution in Puerto Rico. PROMISE has been a critical catalyst for increasing enrollment, retention, and graduation rates of underrepresented minorities. The program also will contribute to the higher education literature on retention and professional development for graduate students and postdocs. The Rotating Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Professors-in-Training program for Maryland's institutions (including Master's serving institutions, HBCUs, community colleges, and an HSI) are among the innovations that respond to AGEP's call to support the national goal of increasing the number of underrepresented minorities who will enter academic STEM careers.

PROMISE AGEP: Maryland Transformation will focus on four sets of alliance activities:
1) Graduate student recruitment, retention, and success; to cultivate new students by creating a pipeline (pathway) for students to be prepared for and admitted to graduate school, participate in workshops that promote retention, and develop community to facilitate persistence;
2) Ph.D. completion and career preparation; to develop activities that will focus on both degree completion and transition to careers;
3) Programs for postdoctoral scholars; to facilitate coordinated policies and programs for mentoring underrepresented minority postdocs across the university system; and
4) Programs to enhance faculty understanding of diversity issues in graduate and postdoctoral education; to open dialog among the faculty to develop promising practices for underrepresented minority recruitment, retention, mentoring, and transitions to careers.

The new project will engage the University System of Maryland in a system-wide focus on diversity in STEM graduate education, and will share resources and facilities to provide professional development for participants that might otherwise be limited or non-existent at some of the institutions without the alliance. This state-wide alliance eliminates the "silo-effect" or independent STEM diversity efforts, and it promotes as a core mission the collaboration to expand and connect a community of scholars through the state. The state-wide alliance allows the institutions to provide pipelines and pathways between institutions for doctoral study, postdoctoral placements, and faculty appointments.

The project includes a research component to explore three research questions: Does experience of micro-affirmations/micro-aggressions, a sense of belonging, professional networks, and mentoring experiences influence graduate student outcomes such as time to degree, persistence, job placement, and a sense of agency in career advancement? How do these outcomes and experiences differ by student demographics, discipline, or institutional type? What role does participation in the PROMISE AGEP play in these experiences and outcomes? The goals of the proposed research are first to determine whether students in the second group are more likely to experience a sense of agency in career advancement, persist in their degree programs and STEM, have shorter time to degree, and find academic appointments post-graduation. Second, the research will explore how the PROMISE program facilitates access to these experiences, promoting educational outcomes for underrepresented minority students in STEM.

This collaborative research brings together five public universities with the goal of developing, implementing, studying, evaluating and disseminating a state level AGEP Alliance model to increase the number of historically underrepresented minority (URM) tenure-track faculty in the biomedical sciences. This AGEP Alliance model represents a state system approach to recruiting and training URM postdoctoral fellows and transitioning them into tenure-track faculty positions. In addition to providing professional development and mentoring for a group of 16 URM postdoctoral fellows and early career faculty, this AGEP Alliance also addresses institutional URM faculty hiring and advancement policies and practices. This AGEP Alliance model work is through partnerships between the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Salisbury University, Towson University, the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP), and the University of Maryland at Baltimore.

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. While this Alliance is primarily funded by the AGEP program, additional support has been provided by the NSF INCLUDES program, which focuses on catalyzing the STEM enterprise to collaboratively work for inclusive change. The ADVANCE program also provided support for this AGEP Alliance model work, and the ADVANCE program embraces three goals that are relevant to this Alliance model's development, implementation and testing: To develop systemic approaches to increase the participation and advancement of women in academic STEM careers; to develop innovative and sustainable ways to promote gender equity that involve both men and women in the STEM academic workforce; and to contribute to the research knowledge base on gender equity and the intersection of gender and other social identities in STEM academic careers.

As the nation addresses 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, work with and 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. This AGEP Alliance's state system approach is advancing a model to improve the success of URM early career biomedical sciences faculty, which ultimately leads to improved academic mentorship for URM undergraduate students in STEM and innovative biological science research to benefit our nation's security, economic progress and prosperity.

The integrated research component, led by UMCP's KerryAnn O'Meara examines how the intersectionality of race, ethnicity and gender shape the experiences of candidates for assistant professorships, and the evaluation of those candidates by reviewers. Institutional faculty hiring practices, processes and procedures are also being studied to better understand how they advantage or disadvantage some candidates over others.

This AGEP Alliance state system model is engaging institutional leadership and external advisory boards, which will provide feedback to the team and suggest adjustments to model development, implementation and testing, as well as efforts for institutional transformation and sustainability. Staff at Westat will provide formative and summative evaluations. The dissemination plan includes article submissions to peer-reviewed social science, academic career diversity, and disciplinary education and research journals.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.