Collaborative Research: The AGEP Engineering Alliance: A Model to Advance Historically Underrepresented Minority Postdoctoral Scholars and Early Career Faculty in Engineering

This Alliance brings together four universities with the goal of developing, implementing, studying, evaluating and disseminating a model focusing on career development for historically underrepresented minority (URM) engineering postdoctoral scholars, who successfully transition into early career faculty positions, and eventually become tenured and promoted in Engineering academic departments. The AGEP Engineering Alliance works with URM postdoctoral scholars to provide them with mentoring, professional development training and the skills necessary to succeed in academic faculty positions.

The model also addresses the needs of the early career faculty, including teaching pedagogy training, grant-writing and student mentoring education. The model work is through partnerships between the Georgia Institute of Technology, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, William Marsh Rice University, and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.

This alliance was created in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation (NSF 16-552). The AGEP program seeks to advance knowledge about models to improve pathways to the professoriate and success of URM graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in specific STEM disciplines and/or STEM education research fields.

AGEP Transformation Alliances develop, replicate or reproduce; implement and study, via integrated educational and social science research, models to transform the dissertator phase of doctoral education, postdoctoral training and/or faculty advancement, and the transitions within and across the pathway levels, of URMs in STEM and/or STEM education research careers. While this Alliance is primarily funded by the AGEP program, additional support has been provided by the NSF INCLUDES program, which focuses on catalyzing the STEM enterprise to collaboratively work for inclusive change; the Directorate for Engineering's Engineering Research Centers (ERCs) and the Broadening Participation in Engineering (BPE) program; and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources' Historically Black Colleges and Universities - Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) and Centers for Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) program.

As the nation addresses a STEM achievement gap between URM and non-URM undergraduate and graduate students, our universities and colleges struggle to recruit, retain and promote URM STEM faculty who serve as role models and academic leaders for URM students to learn from, work with and emulate. Recent NSF reports indicate that URM STEM associate and full professors occupy 8% of these senior faculty positions at all 4-year colleges and universities, and about 6% of these positions at the nation's most research-intensive institutions.

The AGEP Engineering Alliance has the potential to advance a model to improve the success of URM early career faculty in the field of Engineering, which ultimately leads to improved academic mentorship for URM undergraduate and graduate students in STEM.

One of the research components of the Alliance investigates Engineering post-graduation plans for PhD graduates and their faculty pathways, and another study examines the policies and practices of higher education Engineering programs.

The AGEP Engineering Alliance team will work with the BSCS Science Learning to conduct formative and summative evaluations. They will also engage an Executive Board of institutional administrators and leaders, as well as an external Advisory Board. The boards will provide feedback to the Alliance team and suggest adjustments to the project's management, to the research, and to the model development, implementation, testing, evaluation, dissemination, sustainability and reproduction potential.

The boards will also provide input about how the Alliance work impacts institutional policies and practices to advance URM postdoctoral scholars and early career faculty in their academic Engineering careers.

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.