NSF Award
2316197
Privilege in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is pervasive, introducing bias into scientists’ working assumptions and research practices, including how they educate and mentor the next generation. This conference will gather a diverse group from the STEM and responsible conduct in research (RCR) education communities to raise awareness about these issues, generate useful concepts for understanding them, and identify broadly applicable recommendations for addressing them that build on inclusive mentoring and other promising practices that already exist in research ethics. This project promotes fairness and equity in science, in alignment with NSF’s mission, by expanding knowledge about the negative impacts of privilege in research and identifying effective strategies for mitigating them. <br/><br/>The research team’s team goal is to assemble a network of experts who want to develop a standard ER2 proposal using ideas from the conference to generate new topics in ethical and responsible research (ER2) and new standards for STEM research and RCR training. To ensure broad participation and robust conversations at the conference, the research team will target invitations to historically Black colleges and universities (HCBUs) in the region and to academic and community groups serving underrepresented groups. The conference will feature a keynote speaker to focus workshop conversations around successful strategies for remedying biases resulting from privilege in STEM research, in addition to concurrent workshop sessions. The team will disseminate the conference summary directly to the larger group of invitees, as well as to the actual conference participants. The summary will be archived within one year at the Qualitative Data Repository. After the conference, the research team will post the summary online and maintain an open blog for at least one year to encourage ongoing contact among participants to share ideas, report on activities, and develop long-term collaborative relationships.<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.
