GOLD-EN EAGER: Bringing a diversity program to scale at the Jackson School of Geosciences

The overarching goal of this project is to design and execute a program to support the development of Diversity Champions (DC) at the largest academic geoscience program in the world, the Jackson School of Geosciences (JSG) at the University of Texas (UT). By virtue of its current lack of diversity, its size, and the breadth of geoscience topics being studied, the Jackson School presents an ideal test case to understand and overcome the barriers to upscaling development programs elsewhere across the country.

The PIs propose a two-year program aimed at training faculty, administrators, and research scientists in the JSG to become DC. Training will consist of a series of workshops and activities focused on effective mentorship of students from diverse backgrounds and understanding the barriers for expanding diversity in geosciences. DCs will then participate in recruitment activities and a research mentoring experiences with historically underrepresented students.

Simultaneously, the historically underrepresented students will be supported with a focus on building community across the school that enhances their research experience. The overarching goal is to publish workshop materials and create accessible training tools for future DC at a wide range of academic institutions across the nation.

This project will build, normalize, and empower a community around issues related to diversity in the geosciences at the Jackson School of Geosciences (JSG) through training and social support. The PIs approach is based on two themes: 1) Identify, train, support and incentivize 'Diversity Champions' (DCs) from within the existing community of scholars at the JSG, including faculty and research scientists and 2) Build an underlying program of support for URM undergraduate students at the JSG that includes a range of activities and opportunities aimed at improving community support for students and their mentors/advisers and reducing the support needed by research mentors.

In the context of the two themes, the project will focus on identifying and ameliorating the barriers to recruitment of DCs and their successful completion in the program as well as understanding how the program of support benefits historically UR students. By providing the tools and knowledge to train internal Diversity Champions at a large geoscience research program the PIs will produce a cadre of allies for future generations of students to the program, and ultimately the geoscience community.

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.