Source of Funding

nsf

 

Phase 2 (Current Phase)

Phase 2

 

Funding Source: Funded by NSF 2233683

NSF Organization: Division of Engineering Education and Centers -- Broadening Participation in Engineering (BPE)

Award Number: 2233683

Award Investigators:

  • Renetta  Tull (Principal Investigator)
  • Rachel Jean-Baptiste (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Robin Cresiski (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Janet Rutledge (Co-Principal Investigator)

Start Date: July 15, 2023

End Date (Estimated): June 30, 2025 (Estimated) 

Total Awarded Amount to Date: $399,048

Award Information: NSF Award Search: Award # 2233683 - The PROMISE Engineering Institute Mentor Academy

NSF Organization Information: http://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div=eec

Awarded Abstract

The PROMISE Engineering Institute - Mentoring Academy (PEI-MA) will bring the concept of an ?executive leadership program? to engineering graduate students. Executive leadership programs and similarly styled forums typically include the sharing of advice from experts, discussion of challenges and strategies for success, and cultivation of peer colleague networks. However, these coaching programs are often designed for, and offered to, career professionals who are already in leadership roles, and are on a track toward becoming executive leaders of organizations, e.g., CEOs, presidents, chancellors. The PEI-MA will bring this type of focused and impactful experience to graduate students. The program will expand executive leadership development models to offer facilitated mentoring and follow-up after the initial academy through virtual sessions and cohort-based conference experiences. The PEI-MA will put graduate students into a leadership ecosystem early, while they are still in school, and will expose them to accomplished leaders who are already university presidents. The PEI-MA will leverage the recent successes of Black engineering deans who have become university presidents, and will utilize ?dean-to-president? exemplars as distinguished speakers for the PEI-MA to encourage the students to see themselves as future engineering leaders. The speakers will share successes, challenges, and advice for navigating the early career years of the professorial landscape and trajectories that led to tenure, leadership opportunities, deanships, and university presidencies, without ignoring cultural issues. Graduate student participants will have continued access to these presidents as short-term mentors in follow up, focused one-on-one sessions. The presidents will connect students to resources, supporters, potential employers, and other role models. Through mentoring from peers, staff, and exemplar presidents, the project seeks to build generational engineering leadership identity among the students. The program will be designed to foster this identity, value diversity, and build a mentor network that will encourage retention and pursuit of an engineering academic career pathway. The PEI-MA will share examples of roles and environments that provide opportunities to make strong contributions to science and technology, and leverage engineering and problem-solving skills for higher education leadership.

 

The PEI-MA will be a partnership between the University of California Davis (UC Davis) and the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). UC Davis and UMBC will collaborate to pilot an engineering mentoring academy that tests a theory of change. The PEI-MA will have four activities that directly engage 24 graduate students, in cohorts of 12 per year, over a two-year period. Ten sitting university presidents from across the U.S. will serve as mentors, and the project team of university administrators will serve as mentor-facilitators. The PEI-MA will form a mentoring network or constellation that complements the experience that graduate students have in their home academic departments. The four activities will include: 1) a 3-day workshop in California with mentor presidents and mentor facilitators, 2) follow-up, individualized virtual sessions between graduate students and mentor presidents, 3) facilitated connections at engineering conferences throughout the year, and 4) a Summer Success Institute in Maryland that invites additional graduate students from the region to learn from mentors, and build peer relationships. The research questions will examine ways that the PEI-MA model: impacts career and leadership aspiration, forms generational engineering leadership identity, provides space to discuss difficult topics such as racism, and offers mentoring that suits the needs of students from traditionally underserved groups. The project will facilitate opportunities to cultivate future engineering professors who will have outstanding technical contributions, and consider higher education leadership. The PEI-MA will utilize the National Academies? report, ?The Science of Effective Mentoring in STEMM,? will develop a toolkit of effective ways to establish mentoring networks, and will be designed to scale across STEM fields.

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.

Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.

Phase 1

Phase 1

 

Funding Source: Funded by NSF 2051599

NSF Organization: Division of Engineering Education and Centers -- Broadening Participation in Engineering (BPE)

Award Number: 2051599

Award Investigators:

  • Renetta  Tull (Principal Investigator)
  • Ricardo  Castro (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Cindy  Rubio Gonzalez (Co-Principal Investigator)

Start Date: December 31, 2019

End Date (Estimated): August 31, 2022 

Total Awarded Amount to Date: $314,699

Award Information: NSF Award Search: Award # 2051599 - The PROMISE Engineering Institute 

NSF Organization Information: http://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div=eec

Awarded Abstract

The PROMISE Engineering Institute is a diversity and inclusion effort for the State of Maryland that brings together the state's largest engineering entities to collaborate for the purpose of actively increasing engineering faculty diversity within Maryland. The effort's uniqueness lies with its plan to facilitate faculty diversity by actively leveraging partnerships to provide underrepresented early-career and future engineering professors with intentional professional national and international networks. These networks are designed to increase participants exposure within the engineering community, retain them in the academy, and propel research collaborations particularly related to the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges, and strengthen engineering identity and cultural competencies within engineering's national landscape. The project involves advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, visiting professors, and assistant professors from each of Maryland's engineering schools and colleges: The College of Engineering & IT at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), The Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP), The Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, and the Clarence M. Mitchell School of Engineering at Morgan State University. The PROMISE Engineering Institute will be established with support from the University System of Maryland (12 institutions) and the Maryland Independent College and University Association (15 member institutions). Further, participating scholars will have the opportunity to develop national and international networks to facilitate their interest and engagement in collaborative research and attention to global problems through the PROMISE Engineering Institute's committed partnerships with the Southern Regional Educational Board's Doctoral Scholars Program and Institute for Teaching and Mentoring (SREB), the William Averette Anderson Fund (Bill Anderson Fund , BAF), the Latin and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions (LACCEI), the Global Engineering Deans Council (GEDC), the World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF), the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies (IFEES), and the international Center for the Integration of Teaching, Research, and Learning (CIRTL).

The PROMISE Engineering Institute effort is designed to unify the faculty diversity commitment of the engineering schools within the state, by adding support and commitment from the University System of Maryland (USM) and the Maryland Independent College and University Association (MICUA). The statewide collaborative will address faculty diversity on a broad scale, with shared responsibility across the state's engineering programs. The project will engage in four activities: 1) Portal: There will be a statewide online portal that will showcase engineering advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who are available for faculty positions. 2) Training: Participants will receive professional development and training for collaboration through participation in national and international efforts that will assist with providing them with a global network, key for the engineering disciplines. Further, the training portion will provide scholars with comprehensive research and pedagogical skills. 3) Placement: Campuses in the State of Maryland will collaborate to develop new opportunities to attract diverse scholars such as post-doc to tenure-track conversion models, and collaborative industry-based visiting professorships. These are targeted faculty placement initiatives, supplemented by "toward tenure" activities. 4) Support: The project will facilitate transitional support for new postdocs and assistant professors by bringing together current engineering faculty mentors within departments where scholars are placed, to discuss and develop strong support mechanisms that will facilitate retention. The project will also build communities of practice among the participating scholars that will assist with preparing for roles as engineering faculty. This portion of the project is designed to facilitate collaborative networks of engineering faculty from all races and ranks that connect within and across engineering departments in Maryland The project will be evaluated by Westat, which has developed a logic model that shows the objective as facilitating faculty appointments among scholars who are underrepresented minority (URM) group members in engineering.

Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.