Gabriela Chavira, Ph.D. - US grants

Establishing a sustainable and CRT-informed overall research environment that more strongly motivates and prepares students for research careers and reduces the leakages that occur is an essential aim in our work to help students to successfully navigate these transition points. Faculty mentoring and research activities can directly influence URM student interest and engagement in health and health disparities research and research careers. Extensive faculty development strategies at CSUN and at our diverse Pipeline Partner institutions w/ill better enable faculty to develop their own research programs and NIH proposals that can engage student researchers, with a rigorous mentor training program ensuring a more culturally competent mentoring approach informed by best practices. Within BUILD@CSUN laboratories, students and faculty members will engage in their ongoing research in a cooperative social environment rather than a competitive one - less hierarchical and more inclusive of input from all members of the laboratory and with attention paid to the social justice implications of one's work. Extensive and multimodal collaborations with Research Partners who are already deeply engaged in funded research in health issues in our local community will elevate the scope and impact of our institutional research efforts, and help to augment our focus on health and health disparities research. Our theoretically-based innovation of establishing a CRT-informed research program will be further advanced by embracing recent technological innovation that enables us to link research activities and expertise on a regional and national scale. Online research-sharing and collaboration tools will not replace traditional in-person mentoring relationships but can support faculty professional development and enhance and sustain the interdisciplinary approach necessary to stimulate advances in health disparities research. Entrepreneurial innovation is also an important component of our proposal. A research and training environment that not only prepares students for traditional research careers but exposes them to the possibilities of commercialization through partnerships with local technology incubators is critical in preparing students for the 21st century research workforce.

The BUILD Promoting Opportunities for Diversity in Education and Research (PODER) program at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) employs Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a transformative institutional approach to better understand and interrupt the processes that push scientists of color out of biomedical majors and research careers. All of the initiatives at the institution, and faculty and student level efforts, were focused on preparing students to emerge as successful biomedical scientists. In the first phase, BUILD PODER (i.e., BP-I) developed a series of experiences and materials steeped in CRT for undergraduate biomedical research training. In BP-II, we aim to continue and sustain our scalable and transformative undergraduate biomedical research training program to diversify the biomedical workforce. As in BP-I, we aim to support scholars who link research to social justice and community engagement, providing greater meaning and reason to persevere in the face of formidable barriers in the achievement of educational and career goals. We propose four aims: (1) To invite new underrepresented scholars into and retain them in the biomedical sciences. Our CRT-based approach is intended to appeal to students interested in social justice, and we expect to retain them with meaningful and contextual science that addresses problems in their communities. (2) To sustain activities and materials from BP I and II through a series of institutional, financial, curricular, and human capital initiatives based in needs assessments and strategic planning. (3) To disseminate best practices through traditional methods and a new CSU BUILD Alliance designed to conduct evidence-based testing on modularized training to disseminate to the campus, the California State University system, and nationwide. And finally, (4) to deepen the impact of BUILD PODER by cultivating partnerships with research, pipeline, community, and clinical partners, solidifying and sustaining research relationships beyond BUILD funding. The continuation of BUILD PODER (BP) will provide a complete, 10-year experiment in student and faculty training, infrastructure development, local and broader dissemination, and sustainability, utilizing a promising CRT framework to retain underrepresented students in the biomedical sciences.

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Program, this Track 3 Institutional Transformation Project (ITP) aims to establish the evidence- and equity-based research training hub ESTUDIO: Excellence in Student Training for Undergraduates, Diversity Initiative Office at the California State University, Northridge (CSUN). ESTUDIO – which means “a study” or “research” in Spanish – will allow CSUN to scale the high-impact practice (HIP) of undergraduate research and create opportunities for students to engage in this HIP, while also centering mentoring as part of faculty life and bolster capacity and professional development for mentors. The evidence is unequivocal that undergraduate research under competent mentorship can support the success of all students and significantly diminish or eliminate equity gaps in STEM. This study aims to combine decades-long experience with HIPs and evidence in the literature to create ESTUDIO as a permanent and sustainable campus-wide entity that serves the CSUN STEM community of ~6,000 minoritized students and 500 faculty. By expanding, deploying, and testing an asynchronous and synchronous infrastructure of evidence-based training modules and certificates rooted in an equitable theoretical foundation, this project aims to reach a large community of practitioners, close pervasive and persistent equity gaps, build equitable mentorship capacity, and disseminate content and models to appropriately scale and duplicate these efforts at other HSIs.<br/> <br/>The specific aims are to: 1) scale the HIP of research for all undergraduate STEM students; 2) promote and center equity-based mentorship in faculty retention and tenure; 3) using a theoretical construct, create new knowledge and models that can be adopted by HSIs of varying sizes and means. This project aims to co-create ESTUDIO at CSUN as a campus-wide entity and expand (to ~80) thoroughly tested and efficacious synchronous (in-person, online, and hybrid) undergraduate STEM training modules and to create equity-based and relevant certificate programs for CSUN students and faculty mentors. Approximately 40% of modules and certificates will be converted to an online, adaptive, and asynchronous modality to reach a broad audience and allow for appropriate dissemination. This work will involve support for research projects conducted by four faculty fellows who are emerging STEM and STEM education scholars at CSUN. Together, the investigators and faculty fellows will also study institutional level program implementation processes and metrics to determine: 1) the required minimum viable version of ESTUDIO with most impact and transportability; 2) effective approaches to reducing the gap between faculty expectations and students needs; and 3) the path to creating student-centered and mentorship-aligned retention and promotion criteria. The broader impact of this work is to catalyze a cultural shift at CSUN that will serve as a model for other HSIs, including several HSI campuses in the CSU system, serving over 500,000 students. This aligns with NSFs HSI Program, which aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims.<br/><br/>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.