Our Mission is to Encourage Discussions about Research & Teaching Motivations for Faculty in STEM as well as to Improve Diverse Faculty Preparation to Increase Faculty Retention
- Showcase diverse candidates who seek engineering faculty positions to eliminate the “there aren’t any diverse candidates to hire” response that permeates faculty hiring committees
- Provide students and postdocs with comprehensive research and pedagogical skills, supplemented by development of national and international professional networks to counter the “we can’t find any qualified candidates” response, and to fill the gap of the “it’s not just what you know, but who you know, and who knows you” adage
- Support targeted engineering faculty placement initiatives, supplemented by development of “toward tenure” activities for campuses in the east-west network
- Build tiered PROMISE networks of engineering faculty from all races and ranks that connect within and across departments from institutions in the network to combat issues of “lack of a welcoming environment,” “lack of collegiality,” and “lack of mentoring for diverse faculty.”
Ongoing Collaborators
The PROMISE Engineering Institute network is led by UC Davis and UMBC. The overall network will be led by the “west coast branch” at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). The program will keep its original partners and will extend offerings to engineering stakeholders at 8 additional schools within the University of California (system) with Colleges of Engineering. These include: UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC Merced, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Santa Cruz. Similarly, the “east coast branch,” led by UMBC (via sub-award) will extend offerings to the engineering colleges in Maryland and the surrounding area, with emphasis on Morgan State University (an HBCU), Johns Hopkins University (JHU), and the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP). UC Davis and UMBC are both Minority Serving Institutions (MSI), and this collection of universities within this east-west network, have additional MSIs which include a subset of schools with Department of Education designations for HSI and HBCU.
