NSF Award
1928852
The 2019 Conference of the National Society of Black Physicists, Promoting Professional Connections and Persistence in Physics, 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. Recognizing the power of near-peer role modeling to inspire the next generation of STEM explorers, the 2019 conference will also include a significant number of high school physics teachers and students. 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 Geosciences Directorate and the Directorate for Education and Human Resource Development.<br/><br/>PART 2<br/><br/>The National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP) and the Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) are collaborating to present the 2019 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 further development of student-professional mentor pairings initiated in previous meetings. NSBP and AUI will build on the framework for longitudinal data collection established in the 2018 Annual Meeting to further explore unique needs of under-represented minorities in physics-related disciplines. The external evaluation will continue to 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, including impacts on attitude, self-efficacy, identity, awareness of career opportunities, and workforce development.<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.
