LEAPS: Enabling Scientific Societies to Support Inclusive, Diverse, Equitable & Accepting (IDEA) Scientific Environments

Scientific institutions increasingly recognize the need to remove barriers for individuals historically underrepresented in science and to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). A wider breadth of scientific competencies, achieved by improving DEI, is needed to address many critical scientific concerns with global impacts. However, improving DEI requires a significant cultural shift, and scientific societies provide a unique platform to lead these cultural changes in the biological sciences.

Scientific societies represent a wide variety of individuals and institutions; they have access to multiple fields of biology to impart resources and education; and they can enable networking and idea sharing across many disciplines and organizations to empower new approaches. The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) was founded with the goal of unifying the individuals and organizations that collectively represent the biological sciences, so that the community could address matters that impact life on earth.

AIBS brings together 115 member societies and organizations that represent the full spectrum of the life sciences to address matters of collective concern. It is critical that scientific societies create inclusive, diverse, equitable and accepting (IDEA) scientific environments to ensure that science is equipped to address 21st century grand challenges.

Creating IDEA scientific environments requires an iterative process of top-down and bottom-up approaches that rely on sharing information and experiences, analyzing personal assumptions and expectations, communicating with honesty and openness, and committing to change.

This project will engage and create a collaborative network of majority- and minority-serving biological scientific societies to foster cultural change through two virtual workshops. These workshops will engage scientific society leadership to collaboratively understand the components of IDEA cultures, assess the current culture in biology, identify barriers to enabling IDEA environments, create action plans to overcome these barriers, and commit to long-term cultural change.

The first workshop will provide a forum for leaders of scientific societies to engage in shared learning, discussion, and reflection on three topics: (1) culture, (2) bias and stereotypes, and (3) equity. The workshop will offer tools for participants to develop action plans to enable IDEA scientific environments and to take the knowledge, resources, and tools they have gained back to their organizations.

A second workshop will occur 6 months later and will be informed by a webinar and a participant survey to assess early implementation of the action plans. The workshop will result in longer-term steps to continue progress in creating IDEA scientific environments. Among the intended project outcomes is a “tool kit,” a repository of tools, templates, resources, and other information that will be available to scientific societies, other institutions, and the public.

This tool kit will be curated over time as a place to share information and help cultivate the large-scale changes needed to create IDEA scientific environments.

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.