NSF Award
1806429
PART 1<br/>The 2018 Conference of the National Society of Black Physicists is a combined professional scientific meeting and a student development conference. Open to all, the NSBP conference provides more than 300 undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to participate in research seminars, research presentations and professional relationship building across various subfields of physics. In addition to participating in seminars and sharing their research, participants are provided specific academic and career advising and strategies for persisting in the field of physics today. The NSBP conference offers support for women and under-represented minorities in technical fields; it is one of America's most recognizable annual broadening participation STEM events. Support for the conference is provided by the Directorate for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences, the Directorate of Geosciences, and the Directorate of Educational and Human Resources. <br/><br/>PART 2<br/>The National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP) and the Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) are collaborating to present the 2018 Annual Conference of the NSBP. The conference is both a professional scientific meeting and a student development event whose main goal is to increase the numbers of under-represented minorities involved in the physics academic pipeline, as well as the broader US STEM workforce pipeline. Based on the understanding that socialization among seasoned members of a field and early career workers increases the chances for younger persons to develop career identities and success skills, the meeting aims to promote the participation of African Americans in the physical sciences. The influence of professional scientific meetings on the outcomes of broadening participation of underrepresented minorities is of particular interest at the conference. The conference's unique attendee pool will facilitate the development of student-professional mentor pairings. An external evaluation of the proposed project will provide the framework for longitudinal data collection by integrating data collection methods into the conference communications and planned activities. An external evaluation will focus on judging the value of the conference in terms of its ability to achieve the goals related to both broader impacts and intellectual merit criteria. The intellectual merit of the awarded work rests in discerning features and practices that are relevant to interactions, both tangible and intangible, that may contribute to career identity formation, workforce development and career success in URMs in physics.<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.
