NSF Award
2138250
This award to Jackson State University is supported by the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) and Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) programs. The project team will bring together members of the Carnegie Doctoral Universities High Research (R2) Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), experts in graduate education, graduate students, other HBCUs, and NSF program officers. Two workshops will be organized to address challenges related to increasing the number of STEM Ph.Ds. from underserved populations and providing support and training to investigators from the participating institutions to generate creative proposals for the NRT and IGE programs. The workshops are intended to provide information, understanding, and training on how new graduate models can be created to increase the recruitment, retention, and graduation of minority Ph.D. students. <br/><br/>This project endeavors to develop strategies and critical recommendations that will address growing national concerns about the number of African Americans applying to Ph.D. programs in STEM. By promoting the close interaction of NSF program officers with a coalition of R2 HBCU graduate education stakeholders, the workshops are intended to increase interest in and awareness of the NRT and IGE programs and the number of proposals submitted by R2 HBCU institutions. The specific goals of the workshops are to 1) understand and investigate how to leverage relationships between R2 HBCU institutions and the NRT and IGE programs; 2) investigate current models and best practices between the coalition of R2 HBCUs that may support recruitment, retention, and positioning of Ph.D. STEM students into the U.S. workforce, and 3) provide proposal writing training to support the production of competitive proposals to the NRT and IGE programs to support these models. Additionally, this project will be a path forward to filling in the gaps in outreach to and communications with R2 HBCUs by the NSF, which can lead to greater diversity in the STEM fields. The model that results from this project can then be tested and applied to other NSF programs where R2 HBCUs are underrepresented in funding. <br/><br/>The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs. The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test, and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.<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.
